Designing occupancy studies: general advice and allocating survey effort

MacKenzie and Royle tackled the design side of occupancy studies, asking how to allocate limited survey effort between visiting more sites and surveying each site more intensively to best estimate occupancy and detection. Through analysis of the estimators' precision, they derived guidance on the optimal number of repeat surveys given the detection probability, showing that rarely detected species require more visits per site. For camera-trap studies, where each deployment yields many sampling occasions, these principles inform how long to leave cameras out and how many sites to instrument. The paper is a foundational reference for efficient occupancy survey design and is widely cited when researchers justify their allocation of cameras and survey duration across a landscape.