Work

NicheA: creating virtual species and ecological niches in multivariate environmental scenarios

Year: 2015

Type: article

Abstract: Robust methods by which to generate virtual species are needed urgently in the emerging field of distributional ecology to evaluate performance of techniques for modeling ecological niches and species distributions and to generate new questions in biogeography. Virtual species provide the opportunity to test hypotheses and methods based on known and unbiased distributions. We present Niche Analyst (NicheA), a toolkit developed to generate virtual species following the Hutchinsonian approach of an n ‐multidimensional space occupied by the species. Ecological niche models are generated, analyzed, and visualized in an environmental space, and then projected to the geographic space in the form of continuous or binary species distribution models. NicheA is implemented in a stable and user‐friendly Java platform. The software, online manual, and user support are freely available at < http://nichea.sourceforge.net >.

Source: Ecography

DOI: 10.1111/ecog.01961

Authors: Huijie Qiao, A. Townsend Peterson, Lindsay P. Campbell, Jorge Soberón, Liqiang Ji, Luis E. Escobar

Institutions: Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Zoology, University of Kansas, University of Minnesota

Language: English

Topic: Species Distribution and Climate Change

Subfield: Ecological Modeling

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Life on land

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: National Science Foundation, Microsoft Research, National Natural Science Foundation of China