Application of ROC curve analysis in evaluating the performance of alien species'''' potential distribution models
ROC曲线分析在评价入侵物种分布模型中的应用

Ecological niche models(ENMs),which are widely employed to predict the potential geographic distribution of species,provide an important tool to quantify the risks imposed by invasive alien species. The problem of how to evaluate the performance of different models has attracted more and more attention. In the present paper,we introduced the principle of the method of Receiver Operating Characteristic(ROC) curve analysis in assessing the accuracy of different ENMs. We predicted the suitable distribution area of Ra-dopholus similis,an important banana toppling disease nematode,with five widely used ENMs and evaluated the performance of different models by ROC curve analysis. The area under ROC curve(AUC) for BIO-CLIM,CLIMEX,DOMAIN,GARP,and MAXENT models was 0.810,0.758,0.921,0.903,and 0.950,re-spectively. Among these,the biggest value of AUC was assigned to MAXENT,indicating that the result gained by MAXENT should be better than the other four models. According to the results of analysis of variance(ANOVA),there was a remarkable difference in AUC between each model except for DOMAIN and GARP.