Species Distribution Modelling
An Overview
In order to answer some biodiversity questions, predictive modeling of species' distributions represents an important tool in biogeography, evolution, ecology, conservation, and invasive-species management. Fundamental niche concepts combine occurrence data with ecological/environmental variables to create a model of the species' requirements for the examined variables. The main objective is, with primary occurrence data or absence data in the form of georeferenced coordinates of latitude and longitude for confirmed localities, to generate a model that predicts the species' potential geographic distribution, that can be projected onto a map of the study region. OpenModeller is a framework for species distribution modeling. It is an open source library being developed as part of the speciesLink project. It is entirely based on open source software to accomplish tasks like reading different map file formats, converting between coordinate systems, and performing calculations, in order to providing researchers with the required tools to compare modeling methodologies easily, and to spend more time analyzing and interpreting results. Algorithm using frameworks that take care of handling input data and making projections. Moreover, in the near future, generic libraries like openModeller will be able to perform tasks in a distributed fashion, including running analyses separately in remote cluster processors via web services or GRID paradigms. The modeling process is usually quite complex and time consuming. Preparation of environmental layers is one of the most time-consuming, and computer intensive areas of modeling. There are so many details in collecting and preparing data to be analyzed, selecting the algorithm that best predicts species distribution, and analyzing and interpreting the results, that a single forgot item can lead to big mistakes. So, independent of the modeling software and tools, modeling process must be detailed and really understood, in order to can be correctly applied. This paper intends to show the complete process, and its details, to modeling of species distribution based on fundamental niche concepts in a correct way. Thus, because process first (pre-modeling analysis) and last (post-modeling analysis) steps are not restricted to OpenModeller implementation, this paper is interesting for several environment researches. Learn more. »
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