Open AccessNicheA: creating virtual species and ecological niches in multivariate environmental scenarios
Author(s) -
Qiao Huijie,
Peterson A. Townsend,
Campbell Lindsay P.,
Soberón Jorge,
Ji Liqiang,
Escobar Luis E.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
ecography
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.973
H-Index - 128
eISSN - 1600-0587
pISSN - 0906-7590
DOI - 10.1111/ecog.01961
Subject(s) - ecological niche , environmental niche modelling , niche , ecology , java , species distribution , computer science , field (mathematics) , data science , environmental resource management , biology , environmental science , habitat , mathematics , pure mathematics , programming language
Robust methods by which to generate virtual species are needed urgently in the emerging field of distributional ecology to evaluate performance of techniques for modeling ecological niches and species distributions and to generate new questions in biogeography. Virtual species provide the opportunity to test hypotheses and methods based on known and unbiased distributions. We present Niche Analyst (NicheA), a toolkit developed to generate virtual species following the Hutchinsonian approach of an n-multidimensional space occupied by the species. Ecological niche models are generated, analyzed, and visualized in an environmental space, and then projected to the geographic space in the form of continuous or binary species distribution models. NicheA is implemented in a stable and user-friendly Java platform. The software, online manual, and user support are freely available at .