Marble Algorithm: a solution to estimating ecological niches from presence-only records

We describe an algorithm that helps to predict potential distributional areas for species using presence-only records. The Marble Algorithm is a density-based clustering program based on Hutchinson’s concept of ecological niches as multidimensional hypervolumes in environmental space. The algorithm characterizes this niche space using the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm. When MA is provided with a set of occurrence points in environmental space, the algorithm determines two parameters that allow the points to be grouped into several clusters. These clusters are used as reference sets describing the ecological niche, which can then be mapped onto geographic space and used as the potential distribution of the species. We used both virtual species and ten empirical datasets to compare MA with other distribution-modeling tools, including Bioclimate Analysis and Prediction System, Environmental Niche Factor Analysis, the Genetic Algorithm for Rule-set Production, Maximum Entropy Modeling, Artificial Neural Networks, Climate Space Models, Classification Tree Analysis, Generalised Additive Models, Generalised Boosted Models, Generalised Linear Models, Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines and Random Forests. Results indicate that MA predicts potential distributional areas with high accuracy, moderate robustness, and above-average transferability on all datasets, particularly when dealing with small numbers of occurrences.