Abstract

Using GIS to Automate Distribution Models for New World Trees
Track: Climate Change and Conservation
Authors: John Donoghue II

This presentation will show how ArcGIS Modelbuilder, Python and the geoprocessing environment were instrumental in automating the data processing and analysis workflows for a project to create over 200,000 temperate and tropical plant species distribution models from the largest single-database of species occurrence records spanning the entire New World. The modeling results are helping define the spatial distributions of some tree species that were not previously understood, identify potential ICUN red-list candidates for species with critically small spatial distributions, and better understand how climate and climate change influence species range sizes, abundance, and extinction risk. This presentation will also discuss future data dissemination plans, and how practitioners can overcome the problems associated with combining multiple datasets of spatially referenced ecological data so that the science and conservation communities can effectively combine datasets to help analyze ecological patterns at large spatial scales and understand how species may respond to climate change.