An ecological niche model that considers local relationships among variables: The Environmental String Model

Abstract Many methods have been proposed to model the spatial distribution of a species. While some methods have been specifically designed for this purpose, others are well‐known statistical tools that can be used in many scientific fields. In this paper, I propose a new ecological niche model, called the Environmental String Model (ESM), that is based on the concept of environmental string, which is defined as being a combination of environmental variables, with as many nodes as environmental variables. There are two types of environmental strings: (1) the abundance‐known string and (2) the abundance‐unknown string (or target string) for which an estimation of abundance is searched. The novelty of the model is that it assesses the abundance associated with a target string from nearby abundance‐known strings, which preserve the local multidimensional relationships with the target string. The model does not provide an abundance estimate in the absence of data from a similar environment and it can therefore deal with truncated spatial distributions or niches. It is tested in the North Atlantic Ocean on two key copepod species, Calanus finmarchicus and Calanus helgolandicus , which have been monitored by the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey for decades. I investigate the influence of variables on model performance. I show that the model reconstructs the mean spatial distribution and seasonal fluctuations in both Calanus well. When compared with generalized linear models (GLMs), generalized additive models (GAMs) and generalized regression neural network (GRNN), the ESM gives the best performance. I propose a number of indicators to evaluate the robustness of estimated abundance in space and time and show how the model may be extended to presence/absence or presence‐only data. I think that the ESM could be used to fill gaps in any sampling program such as the CPR survey and many satellite databases (e.g., ocean color and photosynthetically active radiation).