Transferability and model evaluation in ecological niche modeling: a comparison of GARP and Maxent

We compared predictive success in two common algorithms for modeling species’ ecological niches, GARP and Maxent, in a situation that challenged the algorithms to be general – that is, to be able to predict the species’ distributions in broad unsampled regions, here termed transferability. The results were strikingly different between the two algorithms – Maxent models reconstructed the overall distributions of the species at low thresholds, but higher predictive levels of Maxent predictions reflected overfitting to the input data; GARP models, on the other hand, succeeded in anticipating most of the species’ distributional potential, at the cost of increased (apparent, at least) commission error. Receiver…

• NC
  National Center For Environmental Assessment