Intro to ENM course

so this is just bit of an introduction to why would we be giving an ecological niche modelling course I can't just XXXXXX around the room XXXXXX your address that's probably reason enough, but I want you to get to a little bit of context to why we are working in this field and then Richard will give bit of a XXXX as well more focused on the actual modelling aspects but essentially when we talk about adversity of fields is it biodiversity history, is it biodiversity conservation all of the topics XXXXXXX among your colleagues a lot of those fields and having good information about geographic distribution of species obviously there are elements of each of these fields that don't depend on distributional information but each of those fields are enriched by having really good geographic information let me give you the example of biodiversity conservation I am going to show you a number of products here is a book that summerizes biodiversity hotspots and important bird areas in Africa and associated islands this isn't just things that I found in the web they have something in common this is an analysis of endemic bird areas in Peru and protected areas XXXX forests across North Western South America here, critical areas for biodiversity conservation world wide notice this distribution within Africa, maybe you have a different view of those priorities what all those have in common, they all referred biodiversity and they all are geographic in subsets Instill down to being based on information and geographic distribution of species and my question for you is where does that geographic information come from when you look at that, that is summerizing some aspect of biodiverity distributions where does that geographic information come from? and how much do you believe it? here are the mega diverse countries XXXX Africa Endemic bird areas over 200 ecosystems biodiversity hotspots but again all comes back to species, That's a humming bird from the Andes of Peru it comes back to individual species and where they are so that's the question that is kind of the basis of this whole week that we spent together now an increasingly common tendency is to say"Oh, there is digital data sets of XXXXXXXX here is an example where you can get digital distribution maps of important pollinator species digital distribution maps of birds of western hemisphere and mammals of W. hemisphere amphibians of the world, fresh water fish of the US and so depending on where you work maybe you can go to these websites and download and they have some nice XXXXXXXXX that summerize the distributions of all those species here's an example XXXXXXX to that website and downloaded one of the days that's this is for a toucan in Neptropics this is Mexico, Southern Mexico Guatamala and the grey shading is the area that XXXX these distribution of the species the white dots are actual occurences and what I want you to see is XXXXXX standing way in the back if your eyes are as bad as mine are that map is right where you see grey pretty much the birds are there but when you start getting closer you start seeing a lot of little sections of big areas where no records document the species as being present and number of areas where the species is present is outside of the grey shade now there is a first question of what is right what is correct OK one word of correct is XXXX they are in middle America so in that sense they are both kind of in the same place and if I were looking from all the way back there the coincidence is pretty good and that's the XXX occurences here and here by the same time coincidence when I come closer the coicidence is pretty bad ??? so it's very scaled XXX, if I need a coarse resolution view maybe that's absolutely OK. of course the topography of Mexico is very very fine grained across space. so a coarse resolution maybe doesn't do enough if we want to plan for conservation or something like that if we need that fine resolution view maybe those maps (definitely those maps) are XXXXXXXXX so we XXXXXXX to use the one XXXXXXXX just to give you a little bit more detail those maps like this for the toucan are frequently derived from range maps that come with monographic XXXX field guides so you can see that there's a map there and so I took a ruler and I measured from sothern tip of greenland to the southern tip of India is 1.625 inches, sorry about the nonXXXXX system so the actual distance on the earth's surface is 431 million inches and that gives us a map scale of 1 : 265 million that's not a fine scale map that is communicating a lot of detail in fact the width of the outline of each of those countries is huge just the border is huge so there is no way you can XXXXXXX detail and what those maps that I showed you in the previous slides do is that they take this and make out scale and they turn that into those nice round polygons so what I'm after is anything other than the coarsest view of species distributions polygon based XXXXX summeries that are not built in customized fashion will not be enough so that kind of takes to why this methodology came in to be I want you to think about biodiversity in this two dimensional space one is how much we know about the species from nothing to very comprehensive the other dimension is how many species are represnted that XXXXXX not and it appears that quite generally the shape of this relationship is this very negative curve which is to say for very few species do we know a lot talking about XXXXXX XXXXXX for example we know its genome, its protein structure, genetics, distribution, physiology some species are a bit better known, most species are very poorly known so we kind of label different places along that curve where most of the species are little or not at all known here in the middle may be the geographical distribution XXXXXXXX but most of the species on earth are poorly known so for example if you want to use an alternative approach to what we are going to talk to you about this week where we will build exactly the process based model or methodistic models you might be able to deal with that part of the spectrum this is something where we have detailed physiological measurements or a detailed first principles model of the like;y physiology of the species well those are going to be XXXX to only a very small number of species because we require such detailed XXXXXXXXX the approach that we are going to talk about will apply it further essentially they are XXXX to dealwith this end of the spectrum wher we know something about the geographic distribution for described species, almost always atleast you know one place where they occur. the type locality. Now always learn that so the idea behind this methodology from the outset was to have low data requirements at the entry so that it would the methodology would be XXXXX for a large number of species. Essentially what we are going to do is we are going to do a trick we don't trust our geographic sampling to be comprehensive but what we are going to do is we are going to take samples in geography related to the environments essentially make this a position that the species will occur under a XXXXXXXX environments that's why we talk about ecological niche modelling now Richard is going to get up and say ecological "niche" modelling and I am going to remind him that I call him Richard and his name doesn't have a XXXXXXX either so essentially we find some way to infer an environmental distribution you can call it an ecological niche... doesn't really matter, it's finally some sets of environments and seeing where are those environments manifested XXXXXXXXXXXX now how we do all that is pretty complex and the species may have a part of its foot print of its acceptable environment but may not have all of the foot print so I gave you a very simple summary of niche modelling and it's going to get complex essentially compared to now so the three people who have been trying to explain this field to you are Richard Pearson, Enrique Martinez and me we've been working together a decade or something Enrique a bit longer, XXXX sometimes a PhD student at the University of Kansas Richard did a PhD in Britain then a post doc at the American University in the New York City. and years ago I was looking at his CV and I noticed that he put me down as his post doc advisor and I thought WoW! XXXXXXXXXX claim you as my post doc and I query him on it and he said XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX OK right away I put it on my CV Basically I'm proud that I associated with both Enrique and Richard over the years and infact in 2011 we produced this book and it was published by Princeton University press and it is a summary of what we learnt together over the years about this field, not just niche modelling, but single species distributional ecology as well so what are we trying to do this week is a big objective but what we would ideally like to achieve is about the conceptual basis and much of the imperical knowledge so that you are able to do publishable work in this field of ecological niche modelling I am hoping that we'll have lot of discussion and debate XXXXX interchange which is to say please don't be shy if you have a question ask it and if you disagree say so we'll talk about it in the other objective is the capture of XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXX it's not just the 53 of us who can see these presentations and debates so there XXX you got that right? this is a figure of chapter 4 of our book but then I started adding to it everything that I learnt in the XXX few years this is kind of the frame work for our whole week I don't put this up to scare you but rather begin you on an idea XXXXXXXXXX essentially when we come down, we have to assemble occurence data and we have to assemble environmental data and both of those data streams need to be processed in fact they need to be processed in tandem that's where this error of going back and forth between the two data streams but essentially this is dots on the map where your species is known to occur and this is maps of environmental inventions showing what's going on in ideal climate in ideal XXXXXXXX what have you by the time we get here that's where we press the button and learn a niche model we do a whole bunch of things that calibrate those models well there's this evaluation step where basically if we haven't tested our model and made sure if it has some predictive power we shouldn't interpret it so without an evaluation step I am not very interested in looking at a model output and then we can predict our model on to the piece of geography that we are interested in we may be interested in other situations while we mention climate change well, this might be a guess at future climate some other model outfit and then we will XXXXXX it's reputation so it's quite a complex process and certainly the 3 of us and dozen colleagues around the world have been learning lesson after lesson after lesson about how to do this process better we are going to give you our own particular view of that XXXXX we are going to try that point in towards the most critical step and maybe point away from things that we got a lot of time in our XXXXXXX we do our best. If next week somebody is here XXXX doing session touch we can XXXXXX OK we are doing our best to give you a strategic view of how to get from data to useable results as robustly and as efficiently as we can we have already shown you that. Those are all the topics that we are trying to cover so please drink a lot of coffee at each of the breaks because we are going to need it here's again a general plan see if you can get your XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX so that you can to work right at nine o'clock each day lectures for 2 hours, half hour breaks at 11.30 am you are XXXX go off OK you are ready to get back to work hour an a half and hour for lunch hour and half then a break another hour, then you'll be worn out by then and we too and if you have any special needs XXXXXXX regarding diet or schedule just let Kate or me know and we'll do our best to accompaXXXXX you she quietly avoided the microphone when we were doing introduction that's Kate XXXXXXXXXX. her interests so far in 2 years of graduate studying include dryland snake distributions across South America Albatross distributions, pelagic albatross in the Southern oceans XXXXXX river systems in glacial valleys and we'll see what comes next and most importantly that's my grand daughter (SORRYYY I dont know the spellings of her name :((() that's the best recent picture I could find of myself