ECOLOGICAL NICHE MODELING, CONCEPT, APPROACHES AND APPLICATIONS.

Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) serves as an alternative and effective tool for predicting suitable habitats for species with encouraging conservation implications. They are extremely useful in modelling species richness patterns, predicting future distributions, predicting the extent of species invasions and addressing ecological and evolutionary questions. Recently numerous modeling approaches have been successfully applied to predict species distributions especially for species having scarce presence. Here we focus on the conceptual and theoretical foundations on which ENM approach is based. We evaluated various approaches and methods that are being used to model species distributions. We present an overview of two important parameters viz. spatial scale of environmental data and choice of environmental variables both of which have a significant influence on model quality and prediction of suitable habitats. A brief review of the significance of ecological niche modeling is also presented.