Modelling potential distribution of Sapium sebiferum - an invasive tree species in western Himalaya

The use of species distribution models is gaining popularity in biological sciences. We used Maxent, a maximum entropy-based program, to predict distribution of Sapium sebiferum in western Himalaya. Sapium sebiferum is amongst the highly invasive species of the world and its spread in western Himalaya is a serious conservation issue. In order to model its distribution, we used field-collected coordinates of 177 presence locations of the species. Additionally, environmental data downloaded from the worldclim data portal were also used. Maxent was then run using default settings with 70% of the locations being used for training and the remaining 30% for testing the model. Area under curve for the receiving operator analyses measured at all possible threshold values training (0.993) and test (0.993) was close to 1, thereby showing the accuracy of the model.