|
|
Required data for students
Students are required to bring the following data for the modeling course:
- Geographic data.
- A series of GIS layers of environmental variables of the area of interest, such as climate (e.g. min and max temperature, precipitation, Bioclim variables, solar radiation, etc.), topography (elevation, slope, aspect, etc.), vegetation and/or land use / land cover, satellite images, soils, and other data that might be important in determining the distribution of the species of interest. As a general rule, the more layers you bring the better, although not necessarily all of them will be used in the analysis. Environmental data may come from different sources, but all of them have to be in the same geographic projection, and preferably (but not mandatory) in raster format. Pixel size does not need to be the same for all layers.
- Optional: A second set of parallel GIS layers (same thematic maps) for a different region or time period. This set of layers will be used for projecting produced niche models in the original area onto a different region (e.g., for invasiveness analysis) and/or time (e.g. climate change analysis).
It is very important that all geographic information comes with metadata (source, description of the information, date, etc.) and geographic reference (projection, datum, spheroid, reference parallels, etc.).
- Biological Data.
A spreadsheet or database of biological entities records (genes, subspecies, species, etc.) georeferenced in the same projection as the geographic data. Important fields are three: entity, x-coord, and y-coord. Different entities DO NOT have to be in different files, they should be in the same spreadsheet sorted alphabetically. Double-check for spelling errors! Format can be in Plain text, MSExcel, MSAccess, or any compatible format.
Students are urged to consult with course instructors Town Peterson and Enrique Martinez (town@ku.edu, emm@ibiologia.unam.mx) regarding the design of specific projects. Email contact with Town and Enrique can likely avoid problems and loss of class time, so we hope that each student will send a summary of particular data to be brought to the class.
|
