Mapping the Potential Global Distribution of Red Imported Fire Ant (Solenopsis invicta Buren) Based on a Machine Learning Method

Shuai Chen,Dong Jiang,Mengmeng Hao,Fangyu Ding

doi:10.3390/su122310182

Abstract

As one of the most notorious invasive species, the red imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta Buren) has many adverse impacts on biodiversity, environment, agriculture, and human health. Mapping the potential global distribution of S. invicta becomes increasingly important for the prevention and control of its invasion. By combining the most comprehensive occurrence records with an advanced machine learning method and a variety of geographical, climatic, and human factors, we have produced the potential global distribution maps of S. invicta at a spatial resolution of 5 × 5 km2. The results revealed that the potential distribution areas of S. invicta were primarily concentrated in southeastern North America, large parts of South America, East and Southeast Asia, and Central Africa. The deforested areas in Central Africa and the Indo-China Peninsula were particularly at risk from S. invicta invasion. In addition, this study found that human factors such as nighttime light and urban accessibility made considerable contributions to the boosted regression tree (BRT) model. The results provided valuable insights into the formulation of quarantine policies and prevention measures.

Highlights

Biological invasion is a global problem, causing serious environmental, economic, and social damages [1,2]
A ten-fold cross-validation method was applied to each model to avoid overfitting, and the area under the curve (AUC) statistic and true skill statistic (TSS) were used to evaluate the predictive performances of the boosted regression tree (BRT) models
The validation statistics suggested that the ensemble BRT model performed well

Summary

Introduction

Biological invasion is a global problem, causing serious environmental, economic, and social damages [1,2]. S. invicta is native to South America and was accidentally introduced into the United States in the 1930s [10,11]. In subsequent years, this species rapidly spread throughout California and other regions of the world, including the Caribbean islands, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, and South Korea [12,13,14,15,16]. Prevention of biological invasion is much less expensive than post-entry control

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion