Why not WhyWhere: The need for more complex models of simpler environmental spaces

WhyWhere has recently been introduced by Stockwell as a new tool for ecological niche modeling or species distribution modeling. I address two features of WhyWhere and its presentation: (1) the assertion that hundreds of environmental data layers are necessary to summarize ecological variation across environments, and (2) the idea that species’ ecological needs can be summarized in just 2 or 3 dimensions. I present evidence that neither idea is valid, effectively arguing that environmental spaces are simpler than Stockwell envisages, but that more complex and dimensional models are necessary to describe species’ ecological niches. Beyond these conceptual problems, WhyWhere suffers from several more practical problems, which render it little useful for any practical application.