The eastern population has been growing rapidly since the 1980s and is thought to have expanded its geographic range to Quebec, Canada. Understanding the colonization and habitat use by the species in previously unoccupied breeding areas is necessary to develop and apply management measures. Using a dynamic occupancy modelling approach, we investigated the recent colonization and extinction patterns of sandhill cranes in Quebec during a 16-year period. We combined data from three data sets (helicopter surveys, breeding bird atlas surveys, and eBird) to increase the spatial coverage and the number of species occurrence records while accounting for imperfect detection probability.
The raw data used for this article can not be shared. Instead we offer a simulated data-set to run the code. The results will be differents from our study but the steps are there.