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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Ecological Niche Modeling Of Endemic Texas Crayfish Species Under Current Conditions, Sarah A. Burgett Apr 2024

Ecological Niche Modeling Of Endemic Texas Crayfish Species Under Current Conditions, Sarah A. Burgett

Biology Theses

Crayfish play many important roles in freshwater ecosystems such as ecosystem engineering, bioindicator, and food resource. Even though they are important to ecosystems, they are highly understudied. There has been previous work done on ecological niche modeling on Texas crayfish species, but this study takes it a step further by combining soil, climate, and hydrology variables to model the ecological niches of three endemic species: Procambarus texanus, Procambarus nueces, and Procambarus fayettei. Ecological niche models were created for the three species of interest using the program Maxent. I found that P. texanus and P. fayettei have indistinguishable …


Integrating Habitat Suitability Modeling And Radio Telemetry To Describe Habitat Use Of The Western Massasaugas, Sistrurus T. Tergeminus, In Texas, Mitchell R. Barazowski Dec 2016

Integrating Habitat Suitability Modeling And Radio Telemetry To Describe Habitat Use Of The Western Massasaugas, Sistrurus T. Tergeminus, In Texas, Mitchell R. Barazowski

Biology Theses

Habitat suitability modeling using the software package MaxEnt (Phillips, Anderson, & Schapire, 2006) is a popular method for describing the habitat of rare species. MaxEnt uses “presence only” data to develop models; however presence data are highly skewed towards areas of high detection probability and these areas may not represent the full range of habitat use. Thusly, predictions from models developed using only data from areas with high detection probability may not represent all suitable habitat. This study tested the ability of MaxEnt models developed using three different data sets to accurately describe Western Massasauga (Sistrurus t. tergeminus) habitat at …