Commentary |
Corresponding author: Jane Elith ( j.elith@unimelb.edu.au ) Academic editor: Ingolf Kühn
© 2014 Jane Elith, Mark A. Burgman.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Elith J, A. Burgman M (2014) Reply to Kriticos et al. NeoBiota 23: 95-99. doi: 10.3897/neobiota.23.7939
|
![]() |
The
However, the solution to this issue is not to do as
Nevertheless, we agree that predictions in novel environmental space should be treated very cautiously. In
Rather than dealing with every issue in the
Regarding “Predicted area”,
Consider this situation: species A and B exist as native species in a certain region. A might be widespread, and B more narrowly distributed. Only a subset of environments that species A occupies in its native range might exist in a new region, whereas all the environments occupied by species B might exist – in fact, in the new region more environments suitable for B might exist than were available in the native range. Thus it is possible (though completely dependent on the relationships between environmental and geographic space) that species A may tolerate a wider range of environmental conditions than B in their native ranges, but species B may have a wider geographic range in a new region. Thinking further about relationships between environmental and geographic space (see the excellent discussion of these issues by
Predicted area is not necessarily identifiable from presence-only data. Some authors use ‘thresholding’ (setting all values above some predicted value to 1 and all below to zero). However, this is not a remedy, since this merely serves to decrease the amount of information available. In
Lastly,
In conclusion, while we appreciate the motivation of