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VOLUME 20 TEACHING ISSUES AND EXPERIMENTS IN ECOLOGY
PRACTICE

Experimenting with Species Distribution Models to Predict Tree Distributions

Output of script for Eastern Hemlock, focused on current distribution in Maine, predicted habitat across the northeast in current and future time period.

AUTHORS

Noah D. Charney, Kara SantaLucia, Monica Miles, Ian Adelman, and DeCorey Bolton, Jr.

Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Conservation Biology, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469

Corresponding author: Noah D. Charney (noah.charney@maine.edu)

THE ECOLOGICAL QUESTION

How are tree distributions predicted to respond to climate change and how do the choice of species distribution model parameters influence these predictions?

FOUR DIMENSIONAL ECOLOGY EDUCATION (4DEE) FRAMEWORK

  • Core Ecological Concepts:
    • Communities
    • Landscapes
    • Biosphere
  • Ecology Practices:
    • Quantitative reasoning and computational thinking
    • Working collaboratively
  • Human-Environment Interactions:
    • Human impacts on the environment from local to global scales
  • Cross-cutting Themes:
    • Space & Time

WHAT STUDENTS DO

Use R to project future tree distributions across the Northeastern US using Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) and Worldclim data.

STUDENT-ACTIVE APPROACHES

Each student or student group can choose different parameters to experiment with and different species, each exploring their own questions, then students share with the class to compare their findings.

STUDENT ASSESSMENTS

Student presentations in a slideshow, including figures output by R that students annotate and explain.

CLASS TIME

Approximately one 75-minute class period.

COURSE CONTEXT

Mid-level (300s) course aimed for students with prior coursework in ecology. No prior R experience is necessary; however, it is necessary to have R and R Studio installed prior to class on whatever computers will be used for the lab. It is recommended that a standard environment such as a computer lab be used.

SOURCES

DOWNLOADS

Description of resource files

  • Zip that contains all of the files for the exercise [SDM.zip]
  • Optional zip file that contains files for classes that wish to look at a different region other than the northeast. Note that this file is large (14.7GB). [global.zip]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NDC originally developed the code and datasets for teaching Advanced Conservation Biology in the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Conservation Biology at the University of Maine in 2021. This work was supported in part by McIntire-Stennis funding, project award no. ME0-42312, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

CITATION

Noah D. Charney, Kara SantaLucia, Monica Miles, Ian Adelman, DeCorey Bolton, Jr. December 2024. Experimenting with Species Distribution Models to Predict Tree Distributions. Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology, Vol. 20: Practice #5. https://tiee.esa.org/vol/v20/issues/data_sets/charney/abstract.html

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