Journal article
A statistical explanation of MaxEnt for ecologists
J Elith, SJ Phillips, T Hastie, M Dudík, YE Chee, CJ Yates
Diversity and Distributions | Published : 2011
Abstract
MaxEnt is a program for modelling species distributions from presence-only species records. This paper is written for ecologists and describes the MaxEnt model from a statistical perspective, making explicit links between the structure of the model, decisions required in producing a modelled distribution, and knowledge about the species and the data that might affect those decisions. To begin we discuss the characteristics of presence-only data, highlighting implications for modelling distributions. We particularly focus on the problems of sample bias and lack of information on species prevalence. The keystone of the paper is a new statistical explanation of MaxEnt which shows that the model..
View full abstractGrants
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Awarded by U.S. National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
J.E. was supported by an Australian Research Council grant, FT0991640 and by an early consultancy that raised the question of how to explain MaxEnt to end-users (Jeff Tranter, Environmental Resources Information Network, Canberra, Australia). T.H. was partially supported by grant DMS-1007719 from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Simon Ferrier, John Baumgartner and Tord Snall provided useful feedback on ideas and/or the manuscript. Robert Hijmans provided the method for taking samples proportional to area. Stuart Elith helped with artwork. Thanks to the reviewers - Mark Robertson, Janet Franklin and Cory Merow - for generous and constructive comments and good ideas.