Journal article

Here be dragons: A tool for quantifying novelty due to covariate range and correlation change when projecting species distribution models

MB Mesgaran, RD Cousens, BL Webber

Diversity and Distributions | Published : 2014

Abstract

Aim: Correlative species distribution models (SDMs) often involve some degree of projection into novel covariate space (i.e. extrapolation), because calibration data may not encompass the entire space of interest. Most methods for identifying extrapolation focus on the range of each model covariate individually. However, extrapolation can occur that is well within the range of univariate variation, but which exhibits novel combinations between covariates. Our objective was to develop a tool that can detect, distinguish and quantify these two types of novelties: novel univariate range and novel combinations of covariates. Location: Global, Australia, South Africa. Methods: We developed a new ..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Funding Acknowledgements

M.B.M. was supported by the University of Melbourne John McKenzie Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship. B. L. W. acknowledges support from the CSIRO Climate Adaptation and Biosecurity Flagships. We thank Brendan Wintle, Bob O'Hara, Carsten Dormann and two anonymous referees for valuable comments that improved the manuscript. We thank Ehsan Mahmoudi and Arash Zarghamnejad for programming assistance. We thank the co-authors of Webber et al. (2011) for sharing distribution data for Acacia cyclops, which was quality controlled as part of research funded by the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (through the Bilateral Climate Change Partnership Program).