Does GARP really fail miserably? A response to.

Stockman et al. (2006 ) found that ecological niche models built using DesktopGARP ‘failed miserably’ to predict trapdoor spider (genus Promyrmekiaphila) distributions in California. This apparent failure of GARP (Genetic Algorithm for Rule-Set Production) was actually a failure of the authors’ methods, that is, attempting to build ecological niche models using single data points. In this paper, we present a re-analysis of their original data using standard methods with the data appropriately partitioned into training/testing subsets. This re-evaluation generated accurate distributional predictions that we contrast with theirs. We address the consequences of model-building using single data points and the need for a foundational understanding of the principles of ecological niche modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]