Journal article
The art of modelling range-shifting species
Jane Elith, Michael Kearney, Steven Phillips
METHODS IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION | WILEY | Published : 2010
Abstract
1. Species are shifting their ranges at an unprecedented rate through human transportation and environmental change. Correlative species distribution models (SDMs) are frequently applied for predicting potential future distributions of range‐shifting species, despite these models’ assumptions that species are at equilibrium with the environments used to train (fit) the models, and that the training data are representative of conditions to which the models are predicted. Here we explore modelling approaches that aim to minimize extrapolation errors and assess predictions against prior biological knowledge. Our aim was to promote methods appropriate to range‐shifting species. 2. We use an inva..
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Awarded by ARC
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We were supported by ARC grants FT0991640 (Elith), LP0989537 (Elith and Kearney) and the Australian Centre of Excellence for Risk Analysis (Elith). We benefitted from the use of the Urban et al. (2007) data, kindly supplied by Ben Phillips. The idea of smoothing the BRT models by using only early trees was John Leathwicks', and we thank him for interesting conversations on the topic. We appreciate the comments of reviewers and editors; these improved the manuscript. The colours used in several figures are from a palette developed for colour-blind people: http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/html/color_blind/#stain/.