New methods for measuring ENM breadth and overlap in environmental space

Abstract

Environmental niche models (ENM) and species distribution models (SDM) are used to estimate species’ environmental niches and the distribution of suitable habitat. ENMs are used to aid conservation decisions and to study niche evolution. Investigators use metrics of niche breadth (Levins 1968; Mandle et al. 2010) to quantify the estimated geographic distribution of projected habitat suitability, or overlap to measure similarity between ENMs (Warren, Glor, and Turelli 2008a, 2010; Rödder and Engler 2011).