%0 Journal Article %J Ecology %D 2012 %T Gradient forests: calculating importance gradients on physical predictors %A Nick Ellis %A Smith, Stephen J. %A C Roland Pitcher %K Biodiversity %K community data %K compositional turnover %K Great Barrier Reef %K random forests %K variable importance %X

In ecological analyses of species and community distributions there is interest in
the nature of their responses to environmental gradients and in identifying the most important
environmental variables, which may be used for predicting patterns of biodiversity. Methods
such as random forests already exist to assess predictor importance for individual species and
to indicate where along gradients abundance changes. However, there is a need to extend these
methods to whole assemblages, to establish where along the range of these gradients the
important compositional changes occur, and to identify any important thresholds or change
points. We develop such a method, called ‘‘gradient forest,’’ which is an extension of the
random forest approach. By synthesizing the cross-validated R2 and accuracy importance
measures from univariate random forest analyses across multiple species, sampling devices,
and surveys, gradient forest obtains a monotonic function of each predictor that represents the
compositional turnover along the gradient of the predictor. When applied to a synthetic data
set, the method correctly identified the important predictors and delineated where the
compositional change points occurred along these gradients. Application of gradient forest to
a real data set from part of the Great Barrier Reef identified mud fraction of the sediment as
the most important predictor, with highest compositional turnover occurring at mud fraction
values around 25%, and provided similar information for other predictors. Such refined
information allows for more accurate capturing of biodiversity patterns for the purposes of
bioregionalization, delineation of protected areas, or designing of biodiversity surveys.

%B Ecology %V 93 %P 156 - 168 %8 01 Jan 2012 %U http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/11-0252.1 %N 1 %! Ecology %R 10.1890/11-0252.1