I did now find some literature on this topic behind Paywalls, so not sure what the insights are and how the algorithms work:
- MacKenzie, D. I., Nichols, J. D., Royle, J. A., Pollock, K. H., Bailey, L. L., & Hines, J. E. (2006). Occupancy estimation and modeling: inferring patterns and dynamics of species occurrence. Academic Press.
- Guillera-Arroita, G., Ridout, M. S., Morgan, B. J. T., & Linkie, M. (2010). Species occupancy modelling for detection data collected along a transect. Journal of Applied Ecology, 47(1), 173-181.
- Royle, J. A., & Dorazio, R. M. (2008). Hierarchical modeling and inference in ecology: the analysis of data from populations, metapopulations and communities. Academic Press.
- Tyre, A. J., Tenhumberg, B., Field, S. A., Niejalke, D., Parris, K. M., Possingham, H. P., & McCarthy, M. A. (2003). Improving precision and reducing bias in biological surveys: estimating false-negative error rates. Ecological Applications, 13(2), 703-712.
- Warton, D. I., & Shepherd, L. C. (2010). Poisson point process models solve the “pseudo-absence problem” for presence-only data in ecology. Annals of Applied Statistics, 4(3), 1383-1402.
My main interest would be filling gaps in INaturalist. For example I could open the app at some new location and it would ask me to make observations of certain species that were observed in nearby cells. Those might be common species, that I might otherwise not observe, because I think of them as too common to need one more observation (e.g. a birch tree). But not sure if it is an idea worth pursuing by the developers and the community.