Demographic modeling of citizen science data informs habitat preferences and population dynamics of recovering fishes

Managing natural populations and communities requires detailed information regarding demographic processes at large spatial and temporal scales. This combination is challenging for both traditional scientific surveys, which often operate at localized scales, and recent citizen science designs, which often provide data with few auxiliary information (i.e. no information about individual age or condition). We therefore combine citizen science data at large scales with the demographic resolution afforded by recently developed, site-structured demographic models. We apply this approach to categorical data generated from citizen science representing species density of two managed reef fishes in the Gulf of Mexico, and use a modified Dail-Madsen [...]