Reconstructing the Mexican Tropical Dry Forests via an Autoecological Niche Approach: Reconsidering the Ecosystem Boundaries.

ABSTRACT: We used Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) of individual species of two taxonomic groups (plants and birds) in order to reconstruct the climatic distribution of Tropical Dry Forests (TDFs) in Mexico and to analyze their boundaries with other terrestrial ecosystems. The reconstruction for TDFs' distribution was analyzed considering the prediction and omission errors based upon the combination of species, obtained from the overlap of individual models (only plants, only birds, and all species combined). Two verifications were used: a primary vegetation map and 100 independent TDFs localities. We performed a Principal Component (PCA) and Discriminant Analysis (DA) to evaluate the variation in the environmental variables and ecological overlap among ecosystems. The modeling strategies showed diff

SUBMITTER: Prieto-Torres DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4788342 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature