Using other species as environmental data?

[Shannon A.]

Hi, I was wondering if it is at all possible to use the presence of several species to model the potential distribution of a focal species. In other words, I have a species that uses the burrows made by other species as shelter, so I was hoping I could use the occurrences of the burrow-making species to model the potential distribution of the species of interest. I already tried turning point shapefiles into rasters in ArcMap and then using these as the environmental data in Maxent. I repeatedly got the error message that the environmental raster files have different geographic dimensions even though I clipped them all to the same area. I even opened the .asc files to make sure the x and y values were the same for all files. Maybe I'm just wasting my time and this can't be done, but any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

[sse...@umn.edu]

If you use ArcGIS the best way to ensure that you have the same extent is to use, band composite, and make all the rasters into 1 composited image. And load the rasters band by band on Maxent. 

Senait Senay

[Amanda Chunco]

I have used the Maxent output of one species as input for a second competitor species before, so one idea might be to look at a maxent model of the burrowing species and then use that output for your focal species. 

The other idea would be to create a raster not for just the burrows (which would have a binary raster of presence/absence data) but instead create a raster that shows distance to nearest burrow, so you have a continuous distribution. That might make more sense if just being close to a burrow is meaningful vs. being in or not in a burrow. 

Does that make sense? 

Good luck!

Amanda

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 4:46 PM, Shannon A. <shanla...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, I was wondering if it is at all possible to use the presence of several species to model the potential distribution of a focal species. In other words, I have a species that uses the burrows made by other species as shelter, so I was hoping I could use the occurrences of the burrow-making species to model the potential distribution of the species of interest. I already tried turning point shapefiles into rasters in ArcMap and then using these as the environmental data in Maxent. I repeatedly got the error message that the environmental raster files have different geographic dimensions even though I clipped them all to the same area. I even opened the .asc files to make sure the x and y values were the same for all files. Maybe I'm just wasting my time and this can't be done, but any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

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