Species Ecology

Another error-checking tool uses ecological niche-modeling to detect occurrence points that represent ecological outliers for a particular species. This approach combines the pool of specimen data for a species with environmental layers and a machine-learning algorithm for modeling species' ecological niches. When species' occurrence points are overlaid on the geographic predictions of the ecological niche models, outliers (i.e., points outside of the predicted geographic range) have a high probability of error in either species identification or georeferencing. Implementation of this tool through ORNIS will allow collections to flag particular specimens as potentially erroneous and which require further checking.