An ArcGIS Tool for Modeling the Climate Envelope with Feed-Forward ANN

摘要

This article is about the development and application of an ESRI ArcGIS tool that implements a multilayer, feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN) to study the climate envelopes of species. The supervised learning is achieved by a backpropagation algorithm. Based on the distribution and the grids of the climate (and edaphic data) of the reference and future periods, the tool predicts the future potential distribution of the studied species. The trained network can be saved and loaded. A modeling result based on the distribution of European larch (Larix decidua Mill.) is presented as a case study.