Two habitat suitability models for the Eastern Whip-poor-will in eastern Georgian Bay, Ontario, were developed using MaxEnt and multi-criteria decision analysis. The models, created by Paul Grieve, were last updated in May 2026. They incorporate environmental predictors like distance to canopy openings and canopy cover variability, with both models identifying 7% of the landscape as highly suitable habitat.
Use Cases
- Prioritizing land purchase for conservation based on predicted highly suitable habitat areas.
- Planning future field surveys for the Eastern Whip-poor-will using spatially explicit suitability maps.
- Comparing data-driven and expert-derived modeling frameworks for habitat suitability assessment.
- Informing recovery planning for a threatened species by identifying key habitat features like canopy heterogeneity.
Strengths
- Models were validated with occurrence records from three sources: eBird, the Breeding Bird Survey, and targeted local surveys.
- The MaxEnt model achieved an AUC score of 0.73, indicating moderate predictive performance.
- Both models showed largely concordant spatial patterns, with 7% of the landscape classified as highly suitable habitat.
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
- The spatial coverage is limited to the eastern Georgian Bay region of Ontario.
Provenance
- Source
- Borealis Harvested Dataverse
- Collection Method
- Habitat suitability modelling using MaxEnt and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA).
- Freshness
- Last updated 2026-05-02 04:11:48; freshness should be verified.
- Geography
- Eastern Georgian Bay region, Ontario, Canada.