Species distribution modelling
Whilst all the individual SDM techniques yielded good results (AUC > 0.8), RF had the best performance (AUC = 0.98) compared to SRE which had the poorest performance (AUC= 0.84) (Table 5). All models had TSS scores of above 0.4 and thus were all included in the final Ensemble model.
The final Ensemble model had good predictive ability as indicated by TSS scores of 0.80 and an AUC value of 0.95. Analysis into the importance of the environmental variables showed that the driest quarter was the most important environmental variable followed by mean temperature of the coldest quarter and maximum temperature of the warmest month. Adjusted annual precipitation was the least important variable (Table 6).