FactorsR: An RWizard Application for Identifying the Most Likely Causal Factors in Controlling Species Richness

We herein present FactorsR, an RWizard application which provides tools for the identification of the most likely causal factors significantly correlated with species richness, and for depicting on a map the species richness predicted by a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model. As a demonstration of Fa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inDiversity (Basel) Vol. 7; no. 4; pp. 385 - 396
Main Authors Guisande, Cástor, Heine, Juergen, García-Roselló, Emilio, González-Dacosta, Jacinto, Perez-Schofield, Baltasar, González-Vilas, Luis, Vaamonde, Antonio, Lobo, Jorge
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published MDPI AG 16.11.2015
Subjects
patch distribution
species richness
terrestrial carnivores
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Summary:We herein present FactorsR, an RWizard application which provides tools for the identification of the most likely causal factors significantly correlated with species richness, and for depicting on a map the species richness predicted by a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model. As a demonstration of FactorsR, we used an assessment using a database incorporating all species of terrestrial carnivores, a total of 249 species, distributed across 12 families. The model performed with SVM explained 91.9% of the variance observed in the species richness of terrestrial carnivores. Species richness was higher in areas with both higher vegetation index and patch index, i.e., containing higher numbers of species whose range distribution is less fragmented. Lower species richness than expected was observed in Chile, Madagascar, Sumatra, Taiwan, and Sulawesi.
ISSN:1424-2818
1424-2818
DOI:10.3390/d7040385