Urbanization drives habitat suitability of the invasive Cuban Knight Anole (<em>Anolis equestris</em>) in Florida, USA

This dataset supports the study Urbanization Drives Habitat Suitability of the Invasive Cuban Knight Anole (Anolis equestris) in Florida, which evaluated climatic and anthropogenic drivers of habitat suitability in both the species' native range (Cuba) and invasive range (Florida). We developed replicated species distribution models (SDMs) using eight algorithms and ten independent pseudo-absence sets (1:1 PA:presence ratio), with regional stratification and 10-fold cross-validation (100 runs per algorithm). Predictors included climate, topography, vegetation indices, human population density, urban land cover, and a standardized iNaturalist observer-effort layer. An ensemble modeling framework was applied at both the algorithm-specific and global levels. Model performance was assessed with True Skill Statistic (TSS) and Boyce Index (BI) calculated separately for each region. The best-performing model, a Random Forest ensemble, was validated with an independent long-term monitoring dataset from South Florida. Results show that urbanization variables had a stronger influence in Florida, while climate and vegetation played larger roles in Cuba. Predicted high-suitability areas for A. equestris overlapped with occurrence points of three protected invertebrates: Florida tree snail (Liguus fasciatus), Schaus' swallowtail (Papilio aristodemus ponceanus), and Miami tiger beetle (Cicindelidia floridana). This package contains cleaned occurrence records, environmental layers generated for the analysis, habitat suitability rasters for both regions, model performance summaries, invertebrate overlap results, and the R script used to reproduce the workflow.