Laboratory of Disease Ecology & Biogeography
Applications of Spatial Data: Ecological Niche Modeling
NIMBios: 3-5 December 2018, Rooms 205 and 206, NIMBioS (Claxton Education Building)
We are organizing a workshop to learn how to use ecological niche models to understand and predict species distributions.
Where: NIMBioS at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
More information here:
http://www.nimbios.org/tutorials/TT_SpatialData2
Organizers:
Mona Papeş, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Spatial Analysis Lab at NIMBioS, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville
Greg Wiggins, NIMBioS Education & Outreach Coordinator
Objectives: The distribution of a species may be influenced by an array of factors. The set of conditions that allow a species to exist in a geographic area is a representation of the species ecological niche. However, defining these conditions is difficult, due to the complexity of natural systems. One approach to characterizing the ecological niche uses spatial data, GIS software, and modeling algorithms. The objectives of this tutorial are to teach participants the concepts of ecological niche modeling, introduce them to select analytical techniques (formatting GIS data; running maximum entropy – MaxEnt – models) and present how to interpret and apply spatial analyses. Participants will be familiarized with several commonly-used and newly-available online spatial data resources. Instructors will provide datasets to use in hands-on simulations, but participants may also bring their own data if desired. Applications of ecological niche modeling covered in this tutorial are: biogeography, conservation biology, disease ecology, macroecology, and invasion biology.
This tutorial is a repeat of the NIMBioS tutorial offered May 16-18, 2018.
Intended audience. This tutorial is intended for advanced graduate students, postdocs, and faculty interested in learning how to incorporate ecological niche modeling into their research. In order to qualify for this tutorial, participants must have basic knowledge of GIS (ArcGIS, QGIS or R packages). Little to no programming is involved, with ecological niche modeling and spatial analysis conducted using existing applications (MaxEnt) and packages in ArcGIS and R.
Instructors
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Mona Papeş, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Spatial Analysis Lab at NIMBioS, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville
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Town Peterson, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Biodiversity Institute, Univ. of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
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Xiao Feng, Institute of the Environment, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
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Luis Escobar, Fish and Wildlife Conservation, Virginia Tech
3rd International Symposium of Research and Innovation: 17-19 May 2018, Quito, Ecuador
We are organizing a workshop to learn how to use ecological niche models to understand why disease are in one place but not in another.
More information here:
http://www.ibs2018.uevora.pt/programme/workshops/
Organizers: Luis E. Escobar, Virginia Tech, VA, USA. (ecoguate2003@gmail.com) and Juan C. Navarro Castro, Quito, Ecuador (juancarlos.navarro@uisek.edu.ec)
The full-day hands-on workshop will include a variety of analysis in environmental space, from basic to advanced biogeographic applications, including visualization of environmental backgrounds and disease occurrences in environmental dimensions. We will use NicheA 3.0, a free, open-source software, available under the GNU Lesser General Public LicenseThe software is available at http://nichea.sourceforge.net/.
Moore information soon!
International Biogeographical Society meeting: 20-24 March 2018, ÉVORA, PORTUGAL
We are organizing a workshop to learn how to develop ecological niche models using NicheA software.
More information here:
http://www.ibs2018.uevora.pt/programme/workshops/
Organizers: Luis E. Escobar, Virginia Tech, VA, USA. (ecoguate2003@gmail.com) and Huijie Qiao, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China (huijieqiao@gmail.com)
The full-day hands-on workshop will include a variety of analysis in environmental space, from basic to advanced biogeographic applications, including visualization of backgrounds and occurrences in environmental dimensions, projections to future climates, and generation of virtual species. NicheA is free, open-source software, available under the GNU Lesser General Public License, that was published in late 2016 and hast at least 15 scientific citations to date. The software is available at http://nichea.sourceforge.net/. The ecological niche has been a central concept in modern biogeography. G. Evelyn Hutchinson presented a formalization of niche concepts more than 50 yr ago, proposing relationships between ecological niches and geographic spaces (which he called ‘biotopes’); this linkage is known as the Hutchinsonian duality. However, tools for visualizing, exploring, and analyzing distributions of species in these linked spaces have remained limited. In this workshop, participants will learn the theory behind the Hutchinsonian duality and methods to link environmental with geographic space. The workshop will be focused on the installation, features, and application of Niche Analyst (NicheA), a toolkit developed to work on the environmental space following the Hutchinsonian approach of an n-multidimensional space occupied by the species. Furthermore, NicheA is a toolkit including several independent functions with which to analyze the complexity of ecological niche models. Such functions can be arranged, exported, and imported in the form of a workflow. By merging different functions via this tool, users can analyze diverse problems creatively, without the limitations of single- function applications. Thus, NicheA is a workbench at which users can address a variety of questions related to species’ ecological niches and geographic distributions. Because ecological niche modeling is a rapidly-developing field that is seeing impressive research use in addressing various questions in ecology, the workshop will range a variety of topics from basic background generation, ecological niche models based on ellipsoids and polyhedrons, and displays of models from other software (e.g., Maxent, GARP), to more advanced topics like niche similarity estimations, model workflows, and generation of virtual species and environments. Finally, although NicheA has the capability for developing complex analyses under multivariate environmental scenarios; the user-friendly interface makes this software an ideal resource for teaching in ecology.
Reference: Qiao, H., Peterson, A. T., Campbell, L. P., Soberón, J., Ji, L., & Escobar, L. E. (2016). NicheA: Creating virtual species and ecological niches in multivariate environmental scenarios. Ecography, 39, 805–813.
