Predictive Models for Characterization of Ecological Data

Although ARTMAP and ART-based models were introduced in early 70’s they were not used in characterizing and classifying ecological observations. ART-based models have been extensively used for classification models based on satellite imagery. This report, to our knowledge, is the first application of ART-based methods and specifically ARTMAP for predicting habitat selection and spatial distribution of species. We compare the performance of ARTMAP to assess the breeding success of three bird species (Lanius senator, Hippolais pallida, and Calandrella brachydactyla) based on multi-spectral satellite imagery and environmental variables. ARTMAP is superior both in terms of performance (percent correctly classified pcc = 1.00) and generalizability (pcc > 0.96) to those of feedforward multilayer backpropogation (> 0.87, > 0.65), linear and quadratic discriminant analysis (> 0.48, > 0.46) and k-nearest neighbor (> 0.82, > 0.66) methods. Compared to other methods, ARTMAP is able to incorporate new observations with far less computational effort and can easily add data to already trained models.