Vasco M. Tanner

The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) harbors abundant and diverse plant life owing to its high habitat heterogeneity. However, the distribution pattern of biodiversity hotspots and their conservation status remain unclear. Based on 148,283 high-resolution occurrence coordinates of 13,450 seed plants, w…

Plant pest invasions cost billions of Euros each year in Europe. Prediction of likely places of pest introduction could greatly help focus efforts on prevention and control and thus reduce societal costs of pest invasions. Here, we test whether generic data-driven risk maps of pest introduction, val…

Adaptation to different climates fuels the origins and maintenance of biodiversity. Detailing how organisms optimize fitness for their local climates is therefore an essential goal in biology. Although we increasingly understand how survival-related traits evolve as organisms adapt to climatic condi…

Agricultural intensification is a key suspect among putative drivers of recent insect declines, but an explicit link between historical change in agricultural land cover and insect occurrence is lacking. Determining whether agriculture impacts beneficial insects (e.g. pollinators), is crucial to enh…

Factors driving the spatial configuration of centres of endemism have long been a topic of broad interest and debate. Due to different eco‐evolutionary processes, these highly biodiverse areas may harbour different amounts of ancient and recently diverged organisms (paleo‐ and neo‐endemism, respecti…

Insects are the focus of many recent studies suggesting population declines, but even invaluable pollination service providers such as bees lack a modern distributional synthesis. Here, we combine a uniquely comprehensive checklist of bee species distributions and >5,800,000 public bee occurrence re…

随机森林(Random forest)模型在2001年发表后得到广泛的关注。由于随机森林可以进行回归和判别等多种统计分析,而且不受正态性、方差齐性和自变量独立性等参数检验的前提条件的制约,其应用日益普遍,有被看作万能模型的趋势。实际上,随机森林是一种特点鲜明的模型,应用局部优化拟合观察值,在分析有偏效应关系的数据时,其结果往往不准确。本文以蝉科(Cicadidea)物种的分布数据为例,比较了随机森林在回归分析时与多元线性回归、广义可加模型和人工神经网络模型的差别,在判别分析时与线性判别分析的差别,强调了随机森林预测时的碎片化特点。结果显示随机森林在处理有多元共线性和交互作用的数据时,以及在判别…

In multiple regression Y ~ β0 + β1X1 + β2X2 + β3X1 X2 + ɛ., the interaction term is quantified as the product of X1 and X2. We developed fractional-power interaction regression (FPIR), using βX1M X2N as the interaction term. The rationale of FPIR is that the slopes of Y-X1 regression along the X2 gr…

Müllerian mimicry theory states that frequency-dependent selection should favour geographical convergence of harmful species onto a shared colour pattern. As such, mimetic patterns are commonly circumscribed into discrete mimicry complexes, each containing a predominant phenotype. Outside a few exam…