Maxent software for species habitat modeling

Most current version: 3.3.3k (see new features below).

Use this site to download software based on the maximum-entropy approach for species habitat modeling.  This software takes as input a set of layers or environmental variables (such as elevation, precipitation, etc.), as well as a set of georeferenced occurrence locations, and produces a model of the range of the given species.

Further description of this approach can be found in:

• Steven J. Phillips, Miroslav Dudík, Robert E. Schapire.
  A maximum entropy approach to species distribution modeling.
  In Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Conference on Machine Learning, pages 655-662, 2004.
  pdf

• Steven J. Phillips, Robert P. Anderson, Robert E. Schapire.
  Maximum entropy modeling of species geographic distributions.
  Ecological Modelling, 190:231-259, 2006.
  (datasets used in this paper are available below)
  pdf

• Jane Elith, Steven J. Phillips, Trevor Hastie, Miroslav Dudík, Yung En Chee, Colin J. Yates.
  A statistical explanation of MaxEnt for ecologists.
  Diversity and Distributions, 17:43-57, 2011.
  pdf

Terms of use:   This software may be freely downloaded and used for all educational and research activities.  This software may not be used for any commercial or for-profit purposes.  The software is provided "as-is", and does not come with any warranty or guarantee of any kind.  The software may not be further distributed.  By clicking on the download button below, you agree to these terms.

Please provide your name, institution and email address prior to downloading.

Discussion Group

There is a google discussion group for users of this software at http://groups.google.com/group/Maxent.  Please sign up for this group for discussions and questions about the software, and also to get information about updates, bugs, etc.

Tutorial

A tutorial explaining how to use this software is provided here as a word document.  The data that goes along with this tutorial is available from this zip file.

Translations:

• A Spanish translation of a slightly older version of the tutorial, provided by Paolo Ramoni-Perazzi, is available here. A modified version of this same translation, provided by Jose Marrero, is available here.
• A Russian translation of the tutorial, provided by Maxim Dubinin, is available here.

Datasets

Here are the datasets used in the Ecological Modeling paper referenced above:

• coverages.zip - the coverages we used in modeling.
• ipcc.zip - the raw ipcc data, as dowloaded from the IPCC Data Distribution Centre.  Also the annual and monthly variables we used for our study, extracted from the raw ipcc data and converted into world-wide coverages in .asc format.
• samples.zip - the training and testing sample localities we used.

Main changes in Version 3.3

• Replicated runs added, to allow cross-validation, bootstrapping and repeated subsampling.  After a replicated run, a web page is made that analyzes and combines the results of the individual runs.
• Clamping pictures have changed.  When projecting, the picture showing the effect of clamping now simply shows the difference between the predictions with and without clamping.
• Parameters are treated more uniformly, and many more are exposed in the Settings window and described in the Help window.
• Bug fixed in handling of bias files.
• The feature type buttons have a slightly different meaning, with "auto features" choosing a subset of the selected types.  This allows you to limit the feature types used by auto features.
• More efficient memory usage, to avoid memory problems with large grids.
• Pictures of predictions are now created by default.
• Duplicate presence records are now removed by default.
• Projection onto SWD-format files and writing of background predictions both preserve x and y coordinates of points.
• The html output now gives the command line with all flags needed to repeat a run.
• A limited API for calling Maxent from other Java code.

See readme file for details on changes to earlier versions.