Trends in Ecology & Evolution
Letter‘Niche modeling’: that uncomfortable sensation means it's working. A reply to McInerny and Etienne
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Cited by (15)
A User's Guide to Metaphors In Ecology and Evolution
2019, Trends in Ecology and EvolutionCitation Excerpt :Inspired by the metaphor of the ‘niche’, Grinnell’s notion highlights combinations of habitat and behavior, Elton’s niche consists of considerations such as animal food preferences, and Hutchinson’s version of the niche is defined by the environmental and resource variables that a given biologist happened to regard as important [24,61]. Niche interpretations proliferate to this day [61–63], leading to an ever-larger set rather than convergence on precise consensus regarding a real entity in nature [11,22]. Adaptive radiation is more than a century old and its fan of meaning also widens by the year [11,45,59,64].
Evaluating how species niche modelling is affected by partial distributions with an empirical case
2016, Acta OecologicaCitation Excerpt :Since resolution of species records was high (GPS and 1 km2) and environmental variables have previously been used in lizard studies, we considered that data and number of predictors were sufficient to provide biologically meaningful models (Guisan and Zimmermann, 2000). We calculated 56 realised niche models (RNMs: sensu Sillero, 2011; see also Peterson et al., 2011; Warren, 2012, 2013) using the seven record datasets (CS; VA; AC; DO; CS + VA; CS + VA + AC; CS + VA + AC + DO), two environmental datasets (GPS and 1 km2), and four modelling methods (Maxent, ENFA, Bioclim, and Domain). Maxent or Maximum Entropy model is a general-purpose machine learning method, which is particularly well suited to noisy or sparse information and capable of dealing with continuous and categorical variables at the same time (Maxent 3.2.19 http://www.cs.princeton.edu/∼schapire/maxent; Phillips et al., 2004; Phillips et al., 2006).
Mistaking geography for biology: Inferring processes from species distributions
2014, Trends in Ecology and EvolutionCitation Excerpt :Similarity between models for related species is then tested against null distributions to examine whether species ENMs are more or less similar than expected given some null hypothesis, or whether there is phylogenetic signal in the pattern of ENM overlap (e.g., [35–39]). There is still considerable disagreement about what aspects of the niche these models may estimate (e.g., [40–45]). However, for these models to be informative in studies of niche evolution, one must only assume that evolutionary processes affecting the niche are accurately represented in the differences between species ENMs, not that individual ENMs are necessarily accurate or complete niche estimates.