Question about adding environmental covariates that vary temporally

[ishashyam98]

Hello @Martin-Jung !

I am looking at modelling the distribution of cetaceans using the ibis.iSDM package. My sightings span across multiple months, and I want to include Sea Surface Temperature in the environmental covariates for each of the months. Is there a way to link the sightings to the environmental grid temporally while attempting joint likelihood estimation? Thank you in advance!

[Martin-Jung]

Hi @ishashyam98
Unfortunately not yet and this has been an issue for a while that is yet to be implemented (see #32 ). My suggestion would be to user inlabru directly for the integration (or maybe the sdmTMB package https://pbs-assess.github.io/sdmTMB/ ) and extract the temporally varying covariates prior to model inference (so build yourself a script that extracts the variables per timestep).

[ishashyam98]

Thank you so much for your reply @Martin-Jung !