Network of Conservation Educators & Practitioners Species’ Distribution Modeling for Conservation Educators and Practitioners

.........................................................................................................56 Learning Objectives............................................................................................56 Introduction and Theory.........................................................................................56 Developing a Species’ Distribution Model..............................................................65 Data Types and Sources.......................................................................................65 Biological data................................................................................................67 Environmental data.........................................................................................68 Modeling Algorithms.........................................................................................69 Assesing Predictive Performance.........................................................................73 Strategies for obtaining test data......................................................................73 The presence/absence confusion matrix............................................................74 Test statistics derived from the confusion matrix...............................................76 Threshold-independent assesment. ..................................................................80 Choosing a suitable test statistic........................................................................81 Case Studies............................................................................................................81 Case Study 1: Predicting Distributions of Known and Unknown Species.............81 Case Study 2: Species’ Distribution Modeling as a Tool for Predicting Invasions..82 Case Study 3: Modeling the Potential Impacts of Climate Change.......................83 Acknowledgements................................................................................................84 Terms of Use..........................................................................................................84 Literature Cited.......................................................................................................85