Maxent-directed field surveys identify new populations of narrowly endemic habitat specialists
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biogeography, Conservation Biology, Environmental Sciences, Spatial and Geographic Information Science
- Keywords
- Arkansas, Fallicambarus harpi, fine scale, species distribution model, Procambarus reimeri, Ouachita Mountains, generalized linear model, zero inflated, crayfish
- Copyright
- © 2017 Rhoden 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
- 2017. Maxent-directed field surveys identify new populations of narrowly endemic habitat specialists. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3082v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3082v1
Abstract
Background. Rare or narrowly endemic organisms are difficult to monitor and conserve when their total distribution and habitat preferences are incompletely known. One method employed in determining distributions of these organisms is species distribution modeling (SDM).
Methods. Using two species of narrowly endemic burrowing crayfish species as our study organisms, we sought to ground validate Maxent, a commonly used program to conduct SDMs. We used fine scale (30 m) resolution rasters of pertinent habitat variables collected from historical museum records in 2014. We then ground validated the Maxent model in 2015 by randomly and equally sampling the output from the model.
Results. The Maxent models for both species of crayfish showed positive relationships between predicted relative occurrence rate and crayfish burrow abundance in both a Receiver Operating Characteristic and generalized linear model approach. The ground validation of Maxent led us to new populations and range extensions of both species of crayfish.
Discussion. We conclude that Maxent is a suitable tool for the discovery of new populations of narrowly endemic, rare habitat specialists and our technique may be used for other rare, endemic organisms.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Supplemental Figure 1
AUC graph of the Maxent output for the crayfish species Fallicambarus harpi.
Supplemental Figure 2
AUC graph of the Maxent output for the crayfish species Procambarus reimeri.
Supplemental raw data
Supplemental raw data for Fallicambarus harpi.
Supplemental raw data
Supplemental raw data for Procambarus reimeri.
Thesis document
Thesis document in which raw data and protocols for data collection are stored.