Developing A New Software Package to Enhance Species Distribution Model Functionality

Even when faced with uncertainty about future climate conditions, resource managers are tasked with making planning and adaptation decisions that impact important natural and cultural resources. Species distribution models are widely used by both researchers and managers to estimate species responses to climate change. These models combine data on environmental variables (e.g., temperature, precipitation) with field samples of a species’ presence, absence, and/or abundance to project and visualize potential habitat of the species across space and time. However, species distribution modeling software previously developed and supported by USGS (the Software for Assisted Habitat Modeling [SAHM] package for VisTrails) is no longer under active development. Furthermore, species distribution models alone are not able to represent all of the complex ecological dynamics that dictate actual species’ distributions; thus, species distribution models are most powerful when coupled to other types of modeling approaches.



There is a need to develop a new system for generating, running, and visualizing species distribution models and for connecting them to other modeling tools. The goal of this project is to design and develop a prototype package for running species distribution models in the software platform, SyncroSim. This prototype package will improve the functionality of species distribution models for researchers and resource managers by: 1. allowing end users to customize existing species distribution models written in the R programming language, visualize and store data for different scenarios of species distribution model inputs and outputs, and run species distribution model workflows from SyncroSim; and 2. laying the foundation for more seamless integration of species distribution models with other modeling approaches.