Cited by 100Species Distribution and Climate ChangeWildlife Ecology and ConservationEcology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies

Species Distribution Modeling for Machine Learning Practitioners: A Review

Open access
Beery, Sara, Cole, Elijah, Parker, Joseph, Perona, Pietro, Winner, Kevin·2021·ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies

Abstract

Conservation science depends on an accurate understanding of what’s happening in a given ecosystem. How many species live there? What is the makeup of the population? How is that changing over time? Species Distribution Modeling (SDM) seeks to predict the spatial (and sometimes temporal) patterns of species occurrence, i.e. where a species is likely to be found. The last few years have seen a surge of interest in applying powerful machine learning tools to challenging problems in ecology [2, 5, 8]. Despite its considerable importance, SDM has received relatively little attention from the computer science community. Our goal in this work is to provide computer scientists with the necessary background to read the SDM literature and develop ecologically useful ML-based SDM algorithms. In particular, we introduce key SDM concepts and terminology, review standard models, discuss data availability, and highlight technical challenges and pitfalls.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3460112.3471966

Cites

174 of 176 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Open challenges in species distribution modeling include increasing the scale of joint models geospatially, temporally, and taxonomically; building methods that can leverage multiple data types despite bias from non-uniform sampling strategies; incorporating ecological knowledge such as species dispersal and community composition; and expanding methods for evaluation.

    “Open challenges include increasing the scale of joint models geospatially, temporally, and taxonomically, building methods that can leverage multiple data types despite bias from non-uniform sampling strategies, incorporating ecological knowledge such as species dispersal and community composition, and expanding methods for the evaluation of these models.”

    From Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation (2022) · cites this paper as [146]

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 20

  1. [n.d.]. AI for Animal Re-Identification Workshop at WACV 2020. https://sites.google.com/corp/view/wacv2020animalreid/.
  2. [n.d.]. Fine Grained Visual Categorization Workshop (FGVC) at CVPR. http://www.fgvc.org/.
  3. [n.d.]. ICCV 2019 Workshop and Challenge on Computer Vision for Wildlife Conservation (CVWC). https://cvwc2019.github.io/.
  4. [n.d.]. OOS 64 - Deep Learning for Image Analysis in Ecology, Session at ESA 2020. https://eco.confex.com/eco/2020/meetingapp.cgi/Session/17295.
  5. Laila Bahaa-El-Din, David Mills, Luke Hunter, and Philipp Henschel. 2015. Caracal aurata. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2015.
  6. Sara Beery, Arushi Agarwal, Elijah Cole, and Vighnesh Birodkar. 2021. The iWildCam 2021 Competition Dataset. The Eighth Fine-Grained Visual Categorization Workshop at CVPR (2021).
  7. Sara Beery, Elijah Cole, and Arvi Gjoka. 2020. The iWildCam 2020 Competition Dataset. The Seventh Fine-Grained Visual Categorization Workshop at CVPR (2020).
  8. Sara Beery, Dan Morris, and Pietro Perona. 2019. The iWildCam 2019 Challenge Dataset. The Sixth Fine-Grained Visual Categorization Workshop at CVPR (2019).
  9. Sara Beery, Grant van Horn, Oisin MacAodha, and Pietro Perona. 2019. The iWildCam 2018 Challenge Dataset. The Fifth Fine-Grained Visual Categorization Workshop at CVPR (2019).
  10. Stephen T Buckland, David R Anderson, Kenneth P Burnham, and Jeffrey L Laake. 2005. Distance sampling. Encyclopedia of biostatistics 2 (2005).
  11. Jane Elith and John R Leathwick. 2009. Species distribution models: ecological explanation and prediction across space and time. Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics 40 (2009), 677–697.
  12. Antoine Guisan and Wilfried Thuiller. 2005. Predicting species distribution: offering more than simple habitat models. Ecology letters 8, 9 (2005), 993–1009.
  13. M Arthur Munson, Kevin Webb, Daniel Sheldon, Daniel Fink, Wesley M Hochachka, Marshall Iliff, Mirek Riedewald, Daria Sorokina, Brian Sullivan, Christopher Wood, 2011. The eBird reference dataset. Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, Ithaca, NY [En linea]: http://www. avianknowledge. net/content. Acceso: Julio (2011).
  14. 10.1002/ecm.1370 · DOI
  15. Krishna Pacifici, Brian J. Reich, David A. W. Miller, Beth Gardner, Glenn Stauffer, Susheela Singh, Alexa McKerrow, and Jaime A. Collazo. 2016. Integrating multiple data sources in species distribution modeling: a framework for data fusion. Ecology (2016).
  16. 10.1002/ecy.1710 · DOI
  17. Tim Robertson, Serge Belongie, Adam Hartwig, Christine Kaeser-Chen, Chenyang Zhang, Kiat Chuan Tan, Yulong Liu, Denis Brulé, Cédric Deltheil, Scott Loarie, 2019. Training machines to identify species using gbif-mediated datasets. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards (2019).
  18. DF Stuffer. 2002. Linking populations and habitats: where have we been? Where are we going?Predicting species occurrences: Issues of accuracy and scale (2002).
  19. WCEP Verberk. 2011. Explaining general patterns in species abundance and distributions. Nature Education Knowledge 3, 10 (2011), 38.
  20. Jean-Christophe Vié, Craig Hilton-Taylor, Caroline Pollock, James Ragle, Jane Smart, Simon N Stuart, and Rashila Tong. 2009. The IUCN Red List: a key conservation tool. Wildlife in a changing world–An analysis of the 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (2009), 1.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Beery, S., Cole, E., Parker, J., Perona, P., & Winner, K.
Affiliations
  • California Institute of Technology (US)
  • Yale University (US)
Venue
ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies
Publisher
ACM
Published
2021-06-28
Pages
329-348
OpenAlex
W3184913347
Cited by
100
References
175
Citations by year
2026: 25 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 1
FWCI
37.71
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • CaltechAUTHORS (California Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (1745301)
  • California Institute of Technology
  • Resnick Sustainability Institute for Science, Energy and Sustainability, California Institute of Technology
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecological Modeling › Species Distribution and Climate Change
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Wildlife Ecology and Conservation
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Nature and Landscape Conservation › Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies
Keywords
species distribution modeling, species occurrence prediction, conservation science

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review