An unusual application of a MaxEnt habitat suitability model

The MaxEnt software is often used by ecologists, and others for species habitat modeling based on environmental layers.

So some data I used from the 2011 UK census (England, Wales and Cornwall) was 1. those with a skill in the Welsh language (the full question was only asked of census respondents living in Wales) and 2. those self-describing as Cornish for national identity.

The data is converted from census output polygons, to dots randomly placed within the part of the output polygon below 300m altitude.

Although there is quite a lot of land above 300m in Wales, there is actually only one or two census output area polygons that entirely disappear when terrain above 300m is cut out. So if you're in Blaenavon, apologies for deleting you.

Using the environmental layers of elevation, slope (from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) and distance from the coast, this is the output:

Notice that the habitat suitability for Welsh speakers is actually higher in areas such as the North York Moors, and North Devon than Ynys Môn.

Habitat suitability drops off further than 60km from the coast

Altitudes of 200m-300m appear to be most suitable for Welsh speakers according to the observations of the census data.

The Welsh speakers are not suited to living on flat terrain.

A range of coastal areas are suitable for resettlement of the Cornish in the event of for example,  unexpected reactivation of the igneous activity of the Cornubian batholith.

The population of Wales represented as a multicomponent 0-manifold.

Cornish identity in the 2011 census - part 2

Here is a map showing people throughout Cornwall, England and Wales, who listed Cornish as their national identity:

These are random dots below 300m.

Here is a map of people expressing Welsh identity:

And English (reduced in number by a factor of 10):

Cornish identity in the 2011 census

Here is a dot map representing all people in Cornwall declaring Cornish national identity in the 2011 census, generated using random points clipping the census output areas to the OS OpenData buildings layer.

As a heatmap, classifying by powers of 2:

Speakers of the Welsh language according to 2011 census.

Much was written about a relatively small drop in the percentage of Welsh speakers in Wales as recorded by the 2011 census. I'm sure an astronomer wouldn't believe it was anything other than statistical noise if her data showed a 1% change from one survey to another....

Nevertheless, it is possible to visualise the data in a different way to the standard colorised maps you often see about these things.

One way is the restriction of the census output polygons to where buildings exist as the Datashine project did. However their website does not display statistics for Welsh language skills, since the detailed question was not asked to census respondents living outside Wales.

How about we use a QGIS plugin to give each Welsh speaker in Wales (or actually here, anyone claiming any skill in Welsh) a circular piece of land 50 metres wide, randomly located somewhere below 300 metres above sea level in his output census area polygon:

So here we have the opposite problem to the issues with the typical visualisations with colourised choropleth maps where large but sparsely populated areas dominate visually,namely that denser areas are oversaturated at this scale.

It is also possible to take this random dot distribution and make it into a heatmap (click on the image for a larger version):

I also downloaded the OS OpenData buildings layer for the relevent grid squares covering Wales, and produced another dots distribution (this took QGIS some time).

This produces the following dot maps, giving each Welsh speaker 50 metre and 20 metre diameter circles of land respectively:

Heatmaps: