Dear Adams Ovie Iyiola

Climate plays a decisive role in the distribution of species and serves as the most important factor affecting the growth and reproduction of organisms. When data on the distribution of a species is limited, species distribution models (SDMs) can be used to determine the ecological needs of the species and in estimating its potential range with respect to regional ecology and biogeography. Currently, SDMs mainly include the Genetic Algorithm for Rule-set Prediction (GARP), Ecological Niche Factor Analysis (ENFA), the Bioclimatic Prediction System (Bioclim), the Domain model, and Maximum Entropy Models (MaxEnt). Among these models, MaxEnt is the most accurate and widely applied. MaxEnt adopts a grid format to express how different environmental variables affect the suitability of habitat for a species. If a particular grid point is designated as suitable this means that the grid point possesses the climatic and environmental conditions that are the most suitable for a certain species. MaxEnt is a preferred method when compared with other current approaches because it works with “presence data only;” detecting and collecting absence data is difficult and such data are rarely available. The MaxEnt model output is continuous (maximum likelihood estimate of the relative probability of presence) rather than having a deterministic role.

Maxent is the best

Here also i attache 2 articles that may help:

Chapter Current and future interactions between nature and society in Africa

Article Ecological Niche Modeling As a Tool for Conservation Plannin...

Article Predicting the potential geographical distribution of Nepeta...

Here is also a simple step by step manual about this topic:

Method Ecological Niche Modeling - openModeller User Manual: a simple start

all the best

Hi: For one of my works I modelled effect of climate change on an endangered species. Here is what I would suggest -

Software: Maxent is stand alone software with simple GUI. It uses presence locations and bunch of climatic layers to generate SDM.

Climatic layers: You may either go for WorldClim layers which are based data from weather stations or CHELSA layers which are based on remotely sensed data. You may check which group of layers (interpolation based or satellite data based) performs best for your region of interest.

Model Evaluation: Maxent AUC values are often inflated. So use additional tools to evaluate your models such as AIC, TISS etc. You may use R or ENMTools for evaluating your models.

GCM models: There are several General Circulation Models or GCMs available on WorldClim. I used CCSM4 for my study. You may check which model performs best for your region of interest. No one future climate model suits entire globe. Regional variations have to be taken into consideration.

MaxEnt

Logistic Regression

Artificial Neural Network

MaxEnt results are usually better.

You can also study the results of the methods

Thank you all for the detailed information. All these will go a long way.

@karim, i looktd through the manual for the open modeller, it was quite simple. i will be in touch in case of any grey areas. thank you

Dear Adams Ovie Iyiola

You welcome

@karim. I tried downloading it from openmodeller but did not download as a software as presented in the manual. Any other link to where I can download from?

You can try this Adams Ovie Iyiola

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmodeller/files/openModeller/1.5.0/openModellerSetup1.5.0.exe/download

Dear Adams Ovie Iyiola

the link in the manual work effecently

http://openmodeller.sourceforge.net/

Okay thanks @Tiamiyu @Karim

you can use MaxEnt model.

Article Identification of ecological factors affecting the occurrenc...