EcoNiche: Reproducible Species Habitat Distribution Modeling as an Executable Skill for AI Agents
EcoNiche is a fully automated, reproducible species distribution modeling (SDM) skill that enables AI agents to predict the geographic range of any species with sufficient GBIF occurrence records (≥20) from a single command. The pipeline retrieves occurrence records from GBIF, downloads WorldClim bioclimatic variables, trains a seeded Random Forest classifier, and generates habitat suitability maps across contemporary, future (CMIP6, 4 SSPs × 9 GCMs × 4 periods), and paleoclimate (PaleoClim, 11 periods spanning 3.3 Ma) scenarios. Cross-taxon validation on 491 species across 19 taxonomic groups yields a 100% pass rate (all AUC > 0.7), mean AUC = 0.975, and 98.6% of species achieving AUC > 0.9. Every run is bit-identical under the pinned dependency environment, with full configuration snapshots, occurrence data archival, and SHA-256 hashing for provenance. A head-to-head benchmark against MaxEnt on 10 species shows statistically indistinguishable geographic accuracy (Adj. F1: 0.805 vs. 0.785, p > 0.05) with zero manual tuning.


