HABITUS: Habitat Analysis and Biodiversity Integrated Toolkit for Unified Species Distribution Modelling
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53463/ecopers.20260435Keywords:
species distribution modelling, open source software, machine learning, ecological niche modelling, climate changeAbstract
Species distribution modelling (SDM) underpins conservation planning, biogeography and climate-change impact assessment, yet the available software either presupposes command-line proficiency or obliges the researcher to chain several separate tools together. This technical note is a hands-on tutorial for HABITUS, a standalone desktop application that consolidates the entire SDM workflow within a single graphical interface and requires neither programming nor a proprietary GIS. The tutorial follows the eight-step sequential workflow from beginning to end: importing occurrence records and environmental layers, generating background and pseudo-absence points, screening multicollinearity with variance inflation factors, correlation matrices, the condition number, principal component analysis and LASSO/Ridge regularisation, fitting models from a library of thirteen algorithms, projecting to future climate scenarios, quantifying range change, evaluating performance with the area under the ROC curve, the true skill statistic and the continuous Boyce index, validating against an independent reference map, and generating an automated ten-section report. Every step is illustrated with screenshots from a real analysis of Pinus brutia Ten. (Turkish red pine), based on 108 occurrence records and 23 environmental predictors across Türkiye. The worked example achieved test AUC values of 0.906–0.960 and 89.8% overall accuracy (Cohen's kappa = 0.648) against the independent EUFORGEN chorological map. The tutorial also documents the errors most frequently encountered in applied SDM — mismatched projection layers, reporting net rather than gross range change, validating a map against itself, and relying on a single cross-validation fold — and explains how the software's design prevents or exposes each of them.
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