Life Sciences Commons^™

An Assessment Of Methods For Testing The Reliability Of Wildlife Occurrence Models Used In Gap Analysis, Sandra M. Schaefer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Habitat association models designed to predict species occurrence are often tested by comparing predictions to field observations. Two types of error are then reported, omission (Yo of species not predicted but present on a site) and commission (% of species predicted but not present on a site). The purpose of this research was to assess the Maine Gap Analysis vertebrate predictions using the traditional site-specific approach and to determine what factors influence the amounts of error reported. I also developed a species-specific approach for testing the accuracy of the vertebrate predictions and compared these results to the site-specific method. When …