Spatial occupancy models applied to atlas data show Southern Ground Hornbills strongly depend on protected areas

Determining the range of a species and exploring species–habitat associations are central questions in ecology and can be answered by analyzing presence–absence data. Often, both the sampling of sites and the desired area of inference involve neighboring sites; thus, positive spatial autocorrelation between these sites is expected. Using survey data for the Southern Ground Hornbill ( Bucorvus leadbeateri ) from the Southern African Bird Atlas Project, we compared advantages and disadvantages of three increasingly complex models for species occupancy: an occupancy model that accounted for nondetection but assumed all sites were independent, and two spatial occupancy models that accounted for both nondetection and spatial autocorrelation. We modeled the spatial autocorrelation with an intrinsic conditional autoregressive (ICAR) model and with a restricted spatial regression (RSR) model. Both spatial models can readily be applied to any other gridded, presence–absence data set using a newly introduced R package. The RSR model provided the best inference and was able to capture small‐scale variation that the other models did not. It showed that ground hornbills are strongly dependent on protected areas in the north of their South African range, but less so further south. The ICAR models did not capture any spatial autocorrelation in the data, and they took an order of magnitude longer than the RSR models to run. Thus, the RSR occupancy model appears to be an attractive choice for modeling occurrences at large spatial domains, while accounting for imperfect detection and spatial autocorrelation.