Visualizing uncertainty in habitat suitability models with the hyper-envelope modeling interface, version 2

Ecol Evol. 2018 Dec 18;9(1):251-264. doi: 10.1002/ece3.4720. eCollection 2019 Jan.

Abstract

Habitat suitability models (HSMs) are popular and used for a wide variety of applications but most do not include analysis of the uncertainty of the model outputs. Additionally, some overfit the data and few allow the ability to fill data gaps with expert opinion. HEMI 1 addressed issues with overfitting data and allowed models to incorporate both occurrence data and expert opinion. HEMI 2 improves on HEMI 1 with a simplified interface and the ability to inject random noise into occurrence locations and environmental variable values to generate uncertainty maps. HEMI 2 uses Monte Carlo methods to perform uncertainty, validation, and sensitivity testing and generates mean and standard deviation habitat suitability maps.

Keywords: Bezier curves; habitat suitability modeling; hyper‐envelope modeling interface; species distribution modeling; species niche; uncertainty.