Spatial factor analysis: a new tool for estimating joint species distributions and correlations in species range

Summary Predicting and explaining the distribution and density of species is one of the oldest concerns in ecology. Species distributions can be estimated using geostatistical methods, which estimate a latent spatial variable explaining observed variation in densities, but geostatistical methods may be imprecise for species with low densities or few observations. Additionally, simple geostatistical methods fail to account for correlations in...