blasbenito edited results.tex  almost 9 years ago

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The analysis of variable importance at the continental scale performed with Random Forest (93.61 explained deviance) showed that minimum winter temperature (64.48 \% increment in mean squared error), annual rainfall (60.10 \%IncMSE) and slope (59.23 \%IncMSE) were the factors shaping habitat suitability at the continental scale. The temperature of the warmest month showed an intermediate importance (45.19 \%IncMSE), while summer rainfall (27.66 \%IncMSE) and topographic diversity (25.00 \%IncMSE) were the least important variables. The response curves of the most important predictors (Fig. 5) showed that the optimum habitat suitability values happened when the temperature of the coldest month was higher than 5 Cº), the annual rainfall was between 700 and 1200 mm, and the topographic slope was between 3 and 7 degrees.  The recursive partition analysis of the 44 localities revealed the different environmental processes shaping habitat suitability across Europe. The model based on variable values (Fig. 6) showed that a minimum temperature of the coldest month around -3.7 ºC separated between localities with low and high habitat suitability, and localities with a maximum temperatures of the warmest month between 29 and 34 ºC showed the highest habitat suitability, mostly concentrated along the Mediterranean coast. A few Mediterranean spots did not follow this pattern due to extremely hot summers (bio5 > 34ºC): South-eastern coast of Iberia (27), the region of Marmara (2) and the Black Sea region in Anatolia (3), and Chipre (17). The model based on the local R-squared of the predictors (Fig. 7) showed terminal nodes with a wide range of habitat suitability values, specially for nodes 3, 5 and 6. Node 3 highlighted localities in which both slope and temperature of the warmest month where important defining low habitat suitability values.