Modeling the distribution of the West Nile and Rift Valley Fever vector Culex pipiens in arid and semi-arid regions of the Middle East and North Africa

Table 5 Contribution of environmental parameters to SDMs excluding human population data

Parameter	BRT variable importance	Maxent variable importance	Maxent permutation importance	BRT rank	Maxent rank
EVISD	16.3	44.7	73.6	1	1
EVIMEAN	14.7	12.6	3.3	2	2
EVIMAX	9.7	7.9	11.3	3	4
TWI*	9.4	2.9	1.9	4	9
Bio4	8.2	1.8	5.5	5	10
Bio10*	5.7	3.1	0.1	6	8
Bio15*	5.0	3.3	1.8	7	7
Bio12	5.0	4.6	0.1	8	5
Bio8	4.9	11.7	0.2	9	3
Bio7	4.7	0.7	0.1	10	13
Bio2*	4.3	0.4	0.5	11	14
Bio6	4.3	3.6	0.5	12	6
Bio5*	4.1	1.6	0.0	13	11
Bio9*	3.7	1.0	1.0	14	12

^*Environmental features not utilized in population-inclusive models (Table 4).
Contribution of environmental parameters (Table 1) to species distribution models for Culex pipiens generated using boosted regression trees (“BRT”) and maximum entropy (“Maxent”) methods.

ISSN: 1756-3305