Wednesday, November 10, 2010

New Functions in ENMTools to Identify Environmental Barriers to Dispersal


We're pleased to announce publication of a paper that uses new functions in ENMTools to identify environmental barriers to dispersal. These new features of ENMTools permit identification of two types of environmental barriers that might be acting to maintain geographic boundaries between populations in nature: (1) steep environmental gradients and (2) ribbons of unsuitable habitat. ENMTools is now able to assess the significance of such boundaries in nature using geographically informed randomization procedures. Although you may have noticed that these 'new' features have been available in the last few releases of ENMTools, they haven't been published on previously, or really been explained in enough detail to make them useful. We hope that this will change with publication of this paper! For more details on how to use these new 'range breaking' methods please see section II.c.iii of the ENMTools manual [pdf document].

Glor, R. E. and D. Warren (Accepted Article) Testing ecological explanations for biogeographic boundaries. Evolution. [doi link]

4 comments:

  1. Hey Dan,

    Great paper - I think I will find this particular feature of ENMTools useful in identifying environmental barriers to dispersal for my clownfish now that I've seen it applied here. Unfortunately, I believe that your projection maps and/or occurrence points in Figure 4 have been swapped -- 4A shows occurrence points in the south for A. chlorocyanus, and in the north for A. coelestinus. This is the opposite from what is shown in Figure 3 and from the description in the text. It's unclear if just the points themselves have been swapped, or if the Maxent projections are also swapped, or maybe I've misunderstood something and this is intentional! If it's a mistake I hope you guys catch this before it goes to print!

    Keep up the good work with ENM Tools!
    ~Elizabeth Sbrocco

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  2. Ack! You're entirely right. Thanks for catching this, we're going to see if we can get it fixed before it goes to press.

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  3. How are downloaded executable files? They are not available in the zip folder

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  4. It was very nice article and it is very useful to Linux learners.We also provide Linux online training

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