With the advent and diversification of hierarchical occupancy model types and their implementation, we aim to evaluate their use and implementation in the peer-reviewed literature (see an overview of occupancy models by \citealp{Iknayan_2014} and \citealp{Kellner_2023}). This evaluation aims to identify taxa, detection procedures used, study designs, and models adopted by researchers, as well as to examine scientometric trends. The objectives of the study are: 1) to provide a synthesis of taxa, geographic focus, scale, data types, and hierarchical occupancy model variants to date; 2) to identify important contributors to hierarchical occupancy literature and generate research insights using a scientometrical perspective and mapping the co-authorship network and co-citation network; and 3) to identify recommendations to promote the increased use of hierarchical methods as a robust choice for biodiversity monitoring.

Methods

Literature search and inclusion criteria

We conducted a review of English-written scientific literature (i.e., peer-reviewed articles), published up to December 2022 (excluding early access articles) that apply hierarchical modeling to address research questions in population and community ecology to understand patterns of species abundance, occupancy, co-occurrence or communities and meta-communities. Article selection was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, which provide a transparent workflow to report systematic literature reviews \citep{Page_2021}. The workflow is presented in Figure \ref{118309}.