Folks,
I'm very pleased to see that MaxEnt is now available in ArcGIS Pro 2.9 and 3.0! Wow, this is awesome!
A best practice when modelling biodiversity using MaxEnt is to include a bias file that affects how background points are selected. Survey sampling bias is strong in biodiversity data, and we always include a bias file in our models that represents observations of similar species (Target Group Sampling; Ponder et al. 2001, Phillips et al. 2009), and therefore sampling bias. This is in addition to spatial thinning, which is indeed available in the MaxEnt ArcGIS Pro tool.
I know that it is possible to provide an input point feature that includes background points, so in theory, we could use our bias file to generate background points ourselves, but this represents an additional step that likely means that running MaxEnt directly in ArcGIS Pro is not faster than using the MaxEnt standalone tool. The standalone tool simply requires the bias file to be provided.
Is this something that could be added to the ArcGIS Pro MaxEnt tool? Are there suggestions from folks of how to use a bias file and select background points (to mimic how the MaxEnt standalone tool does this)?
Any help appreciated!
