Tubastraea tagusensis, a coral native to the Galapagos Archipelago, has successfully established and invaded the Brazilian coast where it modifies native tropical rocky shore and coral reef communities. In order to understand the processes underlying the establishment of T. tagusensis, we tested whether Maxent, a tool for species distribution modeling, based on the native range of T. tagusensis...

Maximum entropy (Maxent) modeling was used to predict the potential climatic niches of three medicinally important Asclepiad species: Pentatropis spiralis, Tylophora hirsuta, and Vincetoxicum arnottianum. All three species are members of the Asclepiad plant family, yet they differ in ecological requirements, biogeographic importance, and conservation value. Occurrence data were collected from h...

There are several mystifications and a couple of mysteries pertinent to MaxEnt. The mystifications, pitfalls and traps are set up mainly by an unfortunate formulation of Jaynes’ die problem, the cause célèbre of MaxEnt. After discussing the mystifications a new formulation of the problem is proposed. Then we turn to the mysteries. An answer to the recurring question ’Just what are we accomplish...

In this paper, we propose an improved principal component analysis based on maximum entropy (MaxEnt) preservation, called MaxEnt-PCA, which is derived from a Parzen window estimation of Renyi’s quadratic entropy. Instead of minimizing the reconstruction error either based on L2-norm or L1-norm, the MaxEnt-PCA attempts to preserve as much as possible the uncertainty information of the data measu...

Environmental niche modeling (ENM) is commonly used to develop probabilistic maps of species distribution. Among available ENM techniques, MaxEnt has become one of the most popular tools for modeling species distribution, with hundreds of peer-reviewed articles published each year. MaxEnt's popularity is mainly due to the use of a graphical interface and automatic parameter configuration capabi...

There are many methods for modeling species distribution in the landscape. In this chapter, the authors elaborate on the concepts of species modeling and present three popular techniques to generate species distribution: cartographic overlay, logistic multiple regression and maximum entropy (MAXENT). The cartographic overlay method is relevant to generate a habitat suitability index. Logistic m...

There are many methods for modeling species distribution in the landscape. In this chapter, the authors elaborate on the concepts of species modeling and present three popular techniques to generate species distribution: cartographic overlay, logistic multiple regression and maximum entropy (MAXENT). The cartographic overlay method is relevant to generate a habitat suitability index. Logistic m...

................................................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................... iv CHAPTER 1. BACKGROUND ................................................................................................... 1 History and Ec...

Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura) is a species native to Western Asia that is able to pierce intact fruit during egg laying, causing it to be considered a fruit crop pest in many countries. Drosophila suzukii have a rapid expansion worldwide; occurrences were recorded in North America and Europe in 2008, and South America in 2013. Due to this rapid expansion, we modeled the potential distribution ...

Terrestrial long-distance migrations are declining globally: in North America, nearly 75% have been lost. Yet there has been limited research comparing habitat suitability and connectivity models to identify migration corridors across increasingly fragmented landscapes. Here we use pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) migrations in prairie habitat to compare two types of models that identify habit...