Making better M axent models of species distributions: complexity, overfitting and evaluation

Abstract Aim Models of species niches and distributions have become invaluable to biogeographers over the past decade, yet several outstanding methodological issues remain. Here we address three critical ones: selecting appropriate evaluation data, detecting overfitting, and tuning program settings to approximate optimal model complexity. We integrate solutions to these issues for Maxent models, using the Caribbean spiny pocket mouse, H eteromys anomalus , as an example. Location N orth‐western S outh A merica. Methods We partitioned data into calibration and evaluation datasets via three variations of k ‐fold cross‐validation: randomly partitioned, geographically structured and masked geographically…