Predicting species occurrences with habitat network models.
Damian O Ortiz-Rodríguez1,2,3,4, Antoine Guisan3,5, Rolf Holderegger1,4
1WSL Swiss Federal Research Institute Birmensdorf Switzerland.
Ecology and Evolution
|October 19, 2019
Summary
Predicting species occurrence requires network models that incorporate habitat suitability and network topology. This approach uses readily available presence-only data, outperforming models that only consider local habitat characteristics.
Area of Science:
- Ecology
- Conservation Biology
- Spatial Modeling
Background:
- Biodiversity conservation necessitates tools to predict species occurrence in habitat patches.
- Existing models often require extensive data or solely focus on local habitat traits.
- Habitat patch characteristics, landscape connectivity, and network position influence species presence.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a network-based modeling approach for predicting species occurrence-state using presence-only data.
- To evaluate the importance of local habitat characteristics, weighted connectivity, and network topology for species occurrence.
- To overcome data limitations of traditional species distribution models.
Main Methods:
- Delineated habitat network nodes and generated edges using various cost surfaces (dispersal distance, traffic, inverse suitability).
- Calculated explanatory variables: local habitat (lh), weighted connectivity (wc), and network topology (nt).
- Employed boosted regression trees to relate explanatory variables to species occurrence-state, using a sampling intensity procedure for parametrization.
Main Results:
- Network-based models outperformed a non-topological model in predicting species occurrence.
- Habitat suitability index (lh) was the primary predictor across all tested networks.
- Third-order neighborhood (nt) was the second most important predictor, highlighting the relevance of network position.
Conclusions:
- Topological variables of habitat networks significantly improve predictions of species occurrence-state.
- Species occurrence is primarily driven by habitat suitability and the extent of the surrounding habitat network.
- The proposed network-based approach is versatile and applicable to various species and habitats.
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