Prior specification in one-factor mixed models applied to community ecology data

In community ecology studies the goal is to evaluate the effect of environmental covariates on a response variable while investigating the nature unobserved heterogeneity. We focus on onefactor mixed models in a Bayesian setting and introduce an intuitive Penalized Complexity (PC) prior to balance the variance components of the model. We start with the simple one-way anova and discuss extension to spatially structured residuals, following a Matern exponential covariance.