Multi-objective optimisation of species distribution models for river management

Abstract

Environmental and measure implementation costs are two key factors to be considered by river managers in decision making. To balance effects and costs of an action, practitioners can rely on diagnostic analysis of presence/absence freshwater species distribution models (SDMs) trained to over- or underestimating species presence. Prevalence-adjusted model training aims to balance under- and overestimation depending on study objectives and training data characteristics. The objective of minimising under- and overestimation is a typical example of multi-objective optimisation (MOO). The aim of this paper is to address, for the first time, the practice of MOO-based prevalence-adjusted SDM training for freshwater decision management. In a numerical experiment, the use of Pareto-based MOO, specifically the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II), is compared to commonly-used single-objective optimisation. SDMs for 11 pollution-sensitive freshwater macroinvertebrate species are trained with a subset of the Limnodata, a large data set holding records in the Netherlands over 30 years at 20,000 locations. An increase of two to four times is observed for the ability to identify a large range distribution of the solutions in the Pareto space, when using NSGA-II counter to repeated single-objective optimisation, this by increasing the average runtime with only four percent for a single run. In addition, the use of NSGA-II is found to be effective to identify reliable SDMs useful for diagnostic analysis. By applying and comparing a broad range of MOO methodologies for prevalence-adjusted model training, we believe a closer collaboration between model developers and freshwater managers can be facilitated and environmental standard limits can be set on a more objective basis. In conclusion, the use of MOO for prevalence-adjusted model training is assessed as a valuable tool to support river - and potentially all environmental - decision making.

Keywords: Environmental standard limits; Multi-objective optimisation; Non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II); Prevalence-adjusted model training; River decision management; Species distribution models.