Hi Erica,

I am not aware of any review across sub-fields of ecology. There is, however, a recent paper in Ecography that assessed multi-species occupancy models through time.

Article Multi‐species occupancy models: review, roadmap, and recommendations

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Federico

Thanks, Federico Riva for the citation- its a good example for multi-species occupancy modeling! "The review shows a slant in the literature towards the use of Bayesian models for obtaining multi‐species occupancy estimates, with about 65% of the studies implemented using some instance of BUGS, JAGS or Stan." I'd have to pull out the temporal trend myself, but looks like the data are also published, which is nice.

I'm hoping that a few more similar examples exist out there already

Erica Stuber There is also this older piece in PlosOne

Article Accounting for Imperfect Detection in Ecology: A Quantitative Review

Again, I don't know of any comparisons between sub-field.

Good luck with the review! Looking forward to read it. If help is needed, I'd be happy to help.

Ah, it doesn't look like they pulled out whether analysis was Bayes or freq in that Imperfect Detection review - unfortunate!

Found Figure 1.1 in Bayesian Methods for Ecology By Michael A. McCarthy - proportion of Bayesian studies from 2 Ecology Journals from 1997-2005

and

Figure 1 in A guide to Bayesian model selection for ecologists By Hooten and Hobbs - # Web of Science hits for a couple search strings from 1990-2015 !

Just as an aside, the goal of statistical methods is to give the best guide to what our data is telling us. In many cases the Bayesian and frequentist approaches yield the same result. I suppose this means we really should compare results when different and note what makes them different. Best, David Booth

True, although their interpretations differ, which is sometimes important depending on your goals. From my (limited) perspective, Id argue that Bayesian statistics are relatively underused (in ecology) because until recently there were very few intuitive implementations, user-friendly software, or courses in university curricula for it. In my own experience, frequentist packages (in R) don't have the programmed functionality to run the types of models I am interested in- and Bayes offers an alternative solution.

Here, given the recent uptick in Bayesian tutorials, software, published examples, and friendly workshops, I am interested in the trend in the application of Bayes in the ecology literature!