Accuracy of climate-based forecasts of pathogen spread.

ABSTRACT: Species distribution models (SDMs) are a tool for predicting the eventual geographical range of an emerging pathogen. Most SDMs, however, rely on an assumption of equilibrium with the environment, which an emerging pathogen, by definition, has not reached. To determine if some SDM approaches work better than others for modelling the spread of emerging, non-equilibrium pathogens, we studied time-sensitive predictive performance of SDMs for Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a devastating infectious fungus of amphibians, using multiple methods trained on time-incremented subsets of the available data. We split our data into timeline-based training and testing sets, and evaluated models on each set using standard performance criteria, including AUC, kappa, false negative rate and the Boyc

SUBMITTER: Schatz AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5383844 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature