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Most habitat models developed for defining priority conservation sites target areas currently exhibiting suitable habitat conditions. For species whose habitats have been altered by land use practices, these models may fail to identify sites with the potential of producing suitable habitats, if management practices were modified. Using capercaillie Tetrao urogallus as an example, we propose a m...

Species distribution models (SDMs) use spatial environmental data to make inferences on species' range limits and habitat suitability. Conceptually, these models aim to determine and map components of a species' ecological niche through space and time, and they have become important tools in pure and applied ecology and evolutionary biology. Most approaches are correlative in that they statisti...

The lack of comprehensive sighting data sets precludes the application of standard habitat suitability modeling approaches to predict distributions of the majority of marine mammal species on very large scales. As an alternative, we developed an ecological niche model to map global distributions of 115 cetacean and pinniped species living in the marine environment using more readily available e...

Two of the major limitations to effective management of coral reef ecosystems are a lack of information on the spatial distribution of marine species and a paucity of data on the interacting environmental variables that drive distributional patterns. Advances in marine remote sensing, together with the novel integration of landscape ecology and advanced niche modelling techniques provide an unp...

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are non-linear mapping structures based on the function of the human brain. They have been shown to be universal and highly flexible function approximators for any data. These make powerful tools for models, especially when the underlying data relationships are unknown. In this reason, the international workshop on the applications of ANNs to ecological modelli...

Due to its commercial value and status as a research model there is an extensive body of knowledge concerning Saccharomyces cerevisiae's cell biology and genetics. Investigations into S. cerevisiae's ecology are comparatively lacking, and are mostly focused on the behaviour of this species in high sugar, fruit-based environments; however, fruit is ephemeral, and presumably, S. cerevisiae has ev...

Niche modelling approaches and applications R. A. Catullo, R. Lanfear, P. Doughty and J. S. Keogh: The biogeographical boundaries of northern Australia: evidence from ecological niche models and a multi-locus phylogeny of Uperoleia toadlets (Anura: Myobatrachidae) 659–672 N. E. de Lima, M. S. Lima-Ribeiro, C. F. Tinoco, L. C. Terribile and R. G. Collevatti: Phylogeography and ecological niche m...

The positive relationship between habitat heterogeneity and species richness is a cornerstone of ecology. Recently, it was suggested that this relationship should be unimodal rather than linear due to a tradeoff between environmental heterogeneity and population sizes. Increased environmental heterogeneity will decrease effective habitat sizes, which in turn will increase the rate of local spec...

Delimiting the habitat characteristics describing the environmental conditions required by a species has become a critical tool for predicting organismal responses to environmental change. Grinnell emphasized the effects of environmental factors on the ability of a population to maintain a positive growth rate, yet few studies have included demographic or reproductive data in analyses of the Gr...