Understanding the impacts of global change on organisms and ecosystems requires data and models that represent ecologically-relevant conditions. Here we will provide a hands-on coding workshop to understand microclimate data, and use R packages (e.g. NicheMapR, microclimf, TrenchR) to mechanistically predict microclimate anywhere on the terrestrial planet. This will include retrieving remote sensing data to [...]
Understanding the mechanisms underlying the distribution of biodiversity lies at the core of macroecology and biogeography. To more accurately characterize how organisms experience and interact with their environment, biogeographers can now integrate microclimate models and biophysical models with Species Distribution Models (SDM). This workshop will present software for microclimate and biophysical modeling by working [...]
Join us on Wednesday, January 29 at 10:00 pm UTC, for a talk by Dr. Jamie Wood. A core focus of biogeographical research is how climatic, geological and environmental factors influence the distribution of species on Earth. Yet interactions with other species, through processes such as competition, predation and parasitism, may also strongly influence [...]
Species distribution modeling (SDM) enables conservation scientists to make range estimates for species of concern, as well as predictions of potential range in unsampled areas and for different time periods. With colleagues, we recently (Kass et al., Ecography 2023) developed the application Wallace EcoMod (https://wallaceecomod.github.io/), which offers access to the latest SDM tools through [...]
Join us on Wednesday, September 25, at 4 pm UTC for the Funk Biogeography Seminar given by Sally Keith. Talk Title: "Macrobehaviour: Behavioural Variation Across Space, Time and Taxa " Integrating behavioural ecology and macroecology can provide fundamental new insight into both fields, with particular relevance for understanding ecological responses to rapid environmental change. [...]
Understanding paleoclimatic variations is crucial for deciphering the historical shifts in global ecosystems, which have shaped today's biodiversity. The Temporal Altitudinal Biogeographical Shifts (TABS) R package is a powerful tool designed to model these shifts, providing spatially detailed reconstructions over continuous time series. This workshop aims to equip participants with the knowledge and skills [...]
Associate or Full Professor – Ohio Eminent Scholar of Ecology with a strong track record of research in ecosystem ecology or related fields. Study areas may include, but are not limited to, the effects and consequences of global change on ecological systems (e.g., effects of climate change, biodiversity loss, or habitat degradation); ecosystem processes (e.g., [...]
Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used as a tool for understanding species spatial ecology. They link species occurrence or abundance with environmental features of the location, via statistical modelling. According to ecological niche theory, species response curves are unimodal with respect to environmental gradients. A general problem with most habitat modelling approaches is [...]
sdm is a comprehensive modelling and simulation framework that enables fitting of individual and community-based species distribution models, while supporting markedly different modelling methods including correlative, process-based (mechanistic), agent-based, and cellular automata. It generates ensembles of models, and several options for evaluation of model results and projection of species potential distributions in space and [...]
Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) are a powerful machine learning technique with very promising applications in ecology and biogeography in general, and in species distribution modelling (SDM) in particular. BART can produce highly accurate predictions without overfitting to noise or to particular cases in the data. Notably, unlike most SDM methods, BART generally shows [...]
