BioModelos: A collaborative online system to map species distributions.

Jorge Velásquez-Tibatá,Iván González,María C. Londoño-Murcia,Daniel López-Lozano,César Gutiérrez,María H. Olaya-Rodríguez,Antonios D. Mazaris

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0214522

Jorge Velásquez-Tibatá, Iván González + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214522

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Abstract

Information on species distribution is recognized as a crucial input for biodiversity conservation and management. To that end, considerable resources have been dedicated towards increasing the quantity and availability of species occurrence data, boosting their use in species distribution modeling and online platforms for their dissemination. Currently, those platforms face the challenge of bringing biology into modeling by making informed decisions that result in meaningful models, based on limited occurrence and ecological data. Here we describe BioModelos, a modeling approach supported by an online system and a core team of modelers, whereby a network of experts contributes to the development of species distribution models by assessing the quality of occurrence data, identifying potentially limiting environmental variables, establishing species’ accessible areas and validating modeling predictions qualitatively. Models developed through BioModelos become freely and publicly available once validated by experts, furthering their use in conservation applications. Our approach has been implemented in Colombia since 2013 and it currently consist of a network of nearly 500 experts that collaboratively contribute to enhance the knowledge on the distribution of a growing number of species and it has aided the development of several decision support products such as national risk assessments and biodiversity compensation manuals. BioModelos is an example of operationalization of an essential biodiversity variable at a national level through the implementation of a research infrastructure that enhances the value of open access species data.

Highlights

Species distributions are an essential biodiversity variable (EBV) [1, 2], critical to evaluate species’ conservation status and trends [3, 4], measure biodiversity change [5,6,7], guide conservation and management at the species and community levels [8] as well as to assess their ecosystem services [9], potential impacts on human activities [10, 11] and health [12, 13]
We presented BioModelos, an approach to facilitate collaboration between experts to generate publicly available information on species distribution mediated by a core team and a web app
By involving experts in the development of models, we aim to fill the gaps in primary biodiversity data and assess the biological realism of model predictions by eliciting experts’ opinion on species distribution as well as to avoid the prevalent duplication of efforts in data cleaning and modeling

Summary

Introduction

Species distributions are an essential biodiversity variable (EBV) [1, 2], critical to evaluate species’ conservation status and trends [3, 4], measure biodiversity change [5,6,7], guide conservation and management at the species and community levels [8] as well as to assess their ecosystem services [9], potential impacts on human activities [10, 11] and health [12, 13]. EBV is a key input for the calculation of indicators to evaluate countries’ progress towards achieving international targets, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity Aichi targets

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