Automatic procedures to assist in manual review of marine species distribution maps

Abstract

Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) is a branch of biology that uses algorithms to predict the distribution of species in a geographic area on the basis of a numerical representation of their preferred habitat and environment. Algorithmic maps can be produced for suitable or native habitats and require a review by human experts. During the review operation biologists use their knowledge about a species to modify the maps. They usually take algorithmic maps as starting point in the review. In this paper we provide a methodology for biologists to use the automatic maps as references also during and after the review process. Our approach is based on a comparison between the reviewed map and two systems: an expert system and a Feed Forward Neural Network. Furthermore we suggest an evaluation procedure of the quality of the environmental features used as training set, for assessing the models reliability. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.