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An evaluation of environmental factors affecting species distributions

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  • Ashcroft, Michael B.
  • French, Kristine O.
  • Chisholm, Laurie A.

Abstract

Many different models can be built to explain the distributions of species. Often there is no single model that is clearly better than the alternatives, and this leads to uncertainty over which environmental factors are limiting species’ distributions. We investigated the support for different environmental factors by determining the drop in model performance when selected predictors were excluded from the model building process. We used a paired t-test over 37 plant species so that an environmental factor was only deemed significant if it consistently improved the results for multiple species. Geology and winter minimum temperatures were found to be the environmental factors with the most support, with a significant drop in model performance when either of these factors was excluded. However, there was less support for summer maximum temperature, as other environmental factors could combine to produce similar model performance. Our method of evaluating environmental factors using multiple species will not be capable of detecting predictors that are only important for one or two species, but it is difficult to distinguish these from spurious correlations. The strength of the method is that it increases inference for factors that consistently affect the distributions of many species. We discourage the assessment of models against predefined benchmarks, such as an area under the curve (AUC) of more than 0.7, as many alternative models for the same species produce similar results. Therefore, the benchmarks do not provide any indication of how the performance of the selected model compares to alternative models, and they provide weak inference to accept any selected model.

Suggested Citation

  • Ashcroft, Michael B. & French, Kristine O. & Chisholm, Laurie A., 2011. "An evaluation of environmental factors affecting species distributions," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 222(3), pages 524-531.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:222:y:2011:i:3:p:524-531
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2010.10.003
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Roubicek, A.J. & VanDerWal, J. & Beaumont, L.J. & Pitman, A.J. & Wilson, P. & Hughes, L., 2010. "Does the choice of climate baseline matter in ecological niche modelling?," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 221(19), pages 2280-2286.
    2. Platts, Philip J. & McClean, Colin J. & Lovett, Jon C. & Marchant, Rob, 2008. "Predicting tree distributions in an East African biodiversity hotspot: model selection, data bias and envelope uncertainty," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 218(1), pages 121-134.
    3. Austin, Mike, 2007. "Species distribution models and ecological theory: A critical assessment and some possible new approaches," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 200(1), pages 1-19.
    4. Basille, Mathieu & Calenge, Clément & Marboutin, Éric & Andersen, Reidar & Gaillard, Jean-Michel, 2008. "Assessing habitat selection using multivariate statistics: Some refinements of the ecological-niche factor analysis," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 211(1), pages 233-240.
    5. Peterson, A. Townsend & Papeş, Monica & Soberón, Jorge, 2008. "Rethinking receiver operating characteristic analysis applications in ecological niche modeling," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 213(1), pages 63-72.
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    1. Pliscoff, Patricio & Luebert, Federico & Hilger, Hartmut H. & Guisan, Antoine, 2014. "Effects of alternative sets of climatic predictors on species distribution models and associated estimates of extinction risk: A test with plants in an arid environment," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 288(C), pages 166-177.
    2. Ashcroft, Michael B. & French, Kristine O. & Chisholm, Laurie A., 2012. "A simple post-hoc method to add spatial context to predictive species distribution models," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 228(C), pages 17-26.
    3. Agustín Estrada-Peña & Natalia Fernández-Ruiz, 2023. "An Agenda for Research of Uncovered Epidemiological Patterns of Tick-Borne Pathogens Affecting Human Health," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 20(3), pages 1-14, January.

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