Assessing the effect of fish size on species distribution model performance in southern Chilean rivers
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecosystem Science, Freshwater Biology, Natural Resource Management, Ecohydrology
- Keywords
- Chilean fishes, Random Forest, Neural Networks, General Lineal Model, Anthropogenic variables, species distribution modelling
- Copyright
- © 2018 Zamorano et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Assessing the effect of fish size on species distribution model performance in southern Chilean rivers. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26874v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26874v1
Abstract
Despite its theoretical relationship, the effect of body size on the performance of species distribution models (SDM) has only been assessed in a few studies of terrestrial taxa. We aim to assess the effect of body size on the performance of SDM in river fish. We study seven Chilean freshwater fish, using models trained with three different sets of predictor variables: ecological (Eco), anthropogenic (Antr) and both (Eco+Antr). Our results indicate that the performance of the Eco+Antr models improves with fish size. These results highlight the importance of two novel predictive layers: the source of river flow and the overproduction of biotopes by anthropogenic activities. We compare our work with previous studies that modeled river fish, and observe a similar relationship in most cases. We discuss the current challenges of the modeling of riverine species, and how our work helps suggest possible solutions.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Presences by species to distribution models
Dataset include numerical id (ID), species name (Sp), latitude (Lat; °S, WGS 84), longitude (Lon; °S, WGS 84), and data origin (MMA = Ministerio del Medio Ambiente - Government of Chile; FS = Field sample)