Abstract
Recently, ecological niche models have been employed to investigate the potential geographical distribution of species. However, it is necessary to analyze the vast number of publications on this topic to understand the trends and biases of research using ecological niche models (ENMs). Therefore, this study aims to investigate trends in the scientific literature regarding studies on ENMs. For the quantitative analysis of the literature on ENMs, we performed a search in the Thomson ISI (Web of Science) database between 1991 and 2013. The search identified 3042 papers containing preselected keywords in either the title or abstract. The results showed that the number of papers has increased over the years (r=0.77, P<0.001), with a sharp increase in recent years, highlighting the widespread use of the ENMs. There was an increase in the diversity of journals that published papers about ENMs (r=0.97, P<0.001). The research was conducted in different countries, predominantly the United States of America (550 papers), and the most commonly used method was the Maximum Entropy method (312 papers). Regarding the taxonomic group, most research has been conducted on plants (402 papers, or 28.36% of the total). There was no relationship between the modeling method used and the taxonomic group studied (χ2=4.8, P=0.15). Finally, the wide availability of biological, environmental and computational resources has elicited the broad use of tools for ENMs. Despite the conceptual discussions of the ENMs, this method is currently the most effective way to evaluate the potential geographical distribution of species, and to predict the distribution under different environmental conditions (i.e., future or past scenarios).
Highlights
Statistical methods and computational niche models, based on the concept of Niche theory (Chase and Leibold, 2003) have recently been employed to investigate the potential geographical distribution of species (Peterson et al, 2011)
Our results showed a significant increase in the number of publications on ecological niche models (ENMs) over the past 22 years, especially within the last six years
This growth in the number of publications was a global trend, with various scientometric studies being conducted in different areas showing an exponential growth in the number of publications in recent decades
Summary
Statistical methods and computational niche models, based on the concept of Niche theory (Chase and Leibold, 2003) have recently been employed to investigate the potential geographical distribution of species (Peterson et al, 2011) These models can be useful, as they generate a measure of climate suitability (in different climate scenarios) that can be used as a predictor of demographic (Tôrres et al, 2012), genetic (Diniz-Filho et al, 2009) and ecological variables (Nabout et al, 2011). There has often been discussion in the literature on what has previously been designed (i.e., modeled), such as Grinnellian or Eltonion niches (Sillero, 2011) This discussion arises because the factors that determine the geographic distribution of species are biotic, abiotic and historical (dispersion) (Peterson et al, 2011), whereas the ENMs have previously used only abiotic data to understand the potential geographical distribution
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