A practical framework for a theory-driven ecological niche modeling workflow
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GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
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PUBLIC SUMMARY
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Accurate ecological niche modelling (ENM) requires differentiating between potential and actual habitats.
Simple models often predict a species' full environmental tolerance better than complex, overfitting ones.
A framework guides ENM by setting clear research goals and integrating ecological theory for robust outcomes.
Theory-driven ENM provides accurate predictions, directly improving conservation decisions.
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ABSTRACT
Distributional ecology provides a multidimensional understanding of the complex ecological, evolutionary, and biogeographic factors shaping species’ distributions. Distributional ecology uses ecological niche modeling (ENM) serving as a quantitative approach to estimate species’ ecological niches and their manifestation as likely geographic ranges. Its application is particularly crucial for invasive species, where predicting their potential spread is paramount. An important ongoing debate is how to choose a suitable algorithm and its parameters to perform models well. Nevertheless, a main question should be what ecological niche is being reconstructed, the realized or fundamental? Current protocols and emergent evaluation metrics have only focused on reconstructions of the realized niche, driven by the unbalanced credibility between present and pseudo-absence (or background) occurrences, which often prioritize fitting to the available data while overlooking species’ physiological and ecological constraints. Our findings indicate that generalized linear models (GLMs) effectively reconstruct most of the fundamental niche, whereas hypervolume methods, such as kernel density estimation (KDE) and Marble Algorithm (MA), tend to overfit the data and perform poorly. Similarly, Maxent exhibits limitations in characterizing the fundamental niche. We present a conceptual framework to guide assumptions and workflows in ENM applications to facilitate model selection and interpretation.-
Keywords:
- fundamental niche /
- model /
- realized niche /
- species distribution /
- theoretical framework.
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Qiao H. and Escobar L. E. (2025). A practical framework for a theory-driven ecological niche modeling workflow. The Innovation Life 3:100165. https://doi.org/10.59717/j.xinn-life.2025.100165
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Qiao H. and Escobar L. E. (2025). A practical framework for a theory-driven ecological niche modeling workflow. The Innovation Life 3:100165. https://doi.org/10.59717/j.xinn-life.2025.100165
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Figure 1.
Ecological niches displayed in a bidimensional environmental space
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Figure 2.
Ecological niche modeling visualization in environmental space
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Figure 3.
Conceptual Workflow for the New Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) Framework
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