Facts About Wild Boars
• There are an estimated 4-5 million
feral hogs in the nation and 2.6
million in Texas.
• The US estimates that feral pigs
impose $1.5 billion worth of damage
throughout the country per year.
• Females can produce 10-12 piglets
per litter, but 4-6 young born per
litter is more common in the wild.
• Feral Hogs can be found in 40+ States
Method
By using raster maps of 19 bioclimatic
variables and overlaying each of them
over the locations of the Wild Boar, one
can evaluate which features are the
most important in estimating population
distribution.
What is Entropy?
𝐻 𝜋ො = − ෍ 𝜋ො 𝑥 𝑙𝑛 ෝ𝜋(𝑥)
𝑥∈𝑋
Entropy is a measure of uncertainty.
Maximum Entropy

It can be shown through
Lagrange Multipliers that the
Maximum Entropy
Distribution will have the
form q𝜆 =
𝑒 𝜆∙𝑓 𝑥
𝑍𝜆
, where 𝜆 𝑖𝑠 a
vector of n real-valued
coefficients or feature
weight, 𝑓 𝑥 denotes the
vector of all n features, and
𝑍𝜆 is a normalization
constant that ensures that
𝑞𝜆 sums to 1.
More Constraints on the Maximum
Entropy Distribution
Additionally, the Maximum Entropy distribution
must be the distribution that minimizes the log
loss, or 𝜋[−
෤ ln( 𝑞𝜆 )], an evaluative metric for
binary classification models.
Approximate Species Distribution
Analyzing the Accuracy of the
Model
Conclusions and Future Research

The Percent Contribution Data could be used to perform an Analysis
on the future distributions of Wild Boar in the United States based on
different climate response levels.

Additionally, the accuracy of another model such as Boosted
Regression Trees could be compared to MaxEnt to find the model
that best represents the distribution of Wild Boar.