Data for species distribution models: the environmental data

Abstract

Introduction In general, the suitability of spatial (GIS) environmental data sources for analytical use in ecological modeling (Hunsaker et al ., 1993) has not been given as much attention as other aspect of the SDM problem, such as the species data (Chapter 4) and modeling methods (Chapters 6–8). A few studies have explicitly examined issues of spatial resolution and data quality of predictors on SDMs (Aspinall & Pearson, 1996), have shown that including satellite-derived climate variables with land cover as predictors improves SDMs (Suarez-Seoane et al ., 2004), and have illustrated the impact of predictors derived from digital elevation models on SDMs via error propagation (Van Niel & Austin, 2007). Daly (2006) provided guidelines for assessing the quality of interpolated climate maps used in environmental modeling. However, these efforts, while important, do not give comprehensive guidelines for selecting data to represent environmental gradients related to species distributions. Some software systems developed for SDM include global environmental datasets at 0.01- (mostly 0.5-) 1.0 degree resolution (Hijmans et al ., 2001; Stockwell, 2006), but this is the exception rather than the rule. Usually it is the job of the modeler to select and assemble appropriate predictor data, and consider issues of data quality and resolution; the effort involved is non-trivial. Chapter 3 outlined conceptual models of factors driving species distributions, and in this chapter, I will describe the types of environmental data typically used in SDM to represent those factors, including climate, topography, substrate, land cover and vegetation, disturbance maps, remote sensing-based land surface characterizations, measures of landscape pattern, and information about other species (biotic interactions).