Exploring spatial nonstationary environmental effects on species distribution: a case study of Yellow Perch in Lake Erie
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biogeography, Freshwater Biology, Natural Resource Management, Environmental Impacts
- Keywords
- spatial nonstationarity, species-environment relationships, geographically weighted regression, generalized additive models, Yellow Perch, Lake Erie
- Copyright
- © 2019 Liu 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
- 2019. Exploring spatial nonstationary environmental effects on species distribution: a case study of Yellow Perch in Lake Erie. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27592v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27592v1
Abstract
Background: Global regression models under an implicit assumption of spatial stationarity were commonly applied to estimate the environmental effects on aquatic species distribution. However, the relationships between species distribution and environmental variables may change among spatial locations, especially at large spatial scales with complicated habitat. Local regression models are appropriate supplementary tools to explore species-environment relationships at finer scales.
Method: We applied geographically weighted regression (GWR) models on Yellow Perch in Lake Erie to estimate spatially-varying environmental effects on the presence probabilities of this species. Outputs from GWR were compared with those from generalized additive models (GAMs) in exploring the Yellow Perch distribution. Local regression coefficients from the GWR were mapped to visualize spatially-varying species-environment relationships. K-means cluster analyses based on the t-values of GWR local regression coefficients were used to characterize the distinct zones of ecological relationships.
Results: GWR resulted in a significant improvement over the GAM in goodness-of-fit and accuracy of model prediction. Results from the GWR revealed the magnitude and direction of environmental effects on Yellow Perch distribution changed among spatial location. Consistent species-environment relationships were found in the east basin for juveniles and in the west and east basins for adults. The different kinds of species-environment relationships found in the central management unit implied the variation of relationships at a scale finer than the management unit.
Conclusions: This study draws attention to the importance of accounting for spatial nonstationarity in exploring species-environment relationships. The superiority of GWR over the GAM highlights the limitations of using one global regression model to explore species-environment relationships at a large spatial scale and provides insights for managing Yellow Perch at finer scales.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.