Building on design recommendations from the previous chapter, we highlight additional issues that must be considered when designing a multiple-season occupancy study. Specifically, we discuss the time intervals between seasons, rotating panel designs, and trade-offs between the number of units and the number of seasons. We emphasize the importance of a probabilistic sampling scheme for selecting units to survey (i.e., the probability of a unit being selected from the population of units can be defined). Targeting units that are suspected to be occupied (e.g., based on recent presence records) may lead to apparent trends in occupancy, that could be misleading in some circumstances. In general, we recommend longitudinal studies (i.e., survey the same units over multiple seasons) where the interval between sampling seasons matches the temporal resolution of the motivating biological questions. As with single season studies, pilot studies and computer simulations are particularly valuable to assess alternative field methods, and to gain realistic expectations about the limits on what inferences could be drawn from the resulting data. Refining methods and understanding potential limitation before embarking on the full data collection phase, will enable resources to be used more efficiently, and may avoid future disappointments.
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