BioModelos: A collaborative online system to map species distributions

Publishing date: 2019-04-11

Published on: PLOS ONE

summary: Information on species distribution is recognized as a crucial input for biodiversity conservation and management. To that end, considerable resources have been dedicated towards increasing the quantity and availability of species occurrence data, boosting their use in species distribution modeling and online platforms for their dissemination. Currently, those platforms face the challenge of bringing biology into modeling by making informed decisions that result in meaningful models, based on limited occurrence and ecological data. In this paper the authors describe BioModelos, a modeling approach supported by an online system and a core team of modelers, whereby a network of experts contributes to the development of species distribution models by assessing the quality of occurrence data, identifying potentially limiting environmental variables, establishing species’ accessible areas and validating modeling predictions qualitatively.

authors: Jorge Velásquez-Tibatá, María H. Olaya-Rodríguez, Daniel López-Lozano, César Gutiérrez, Iván González, María C. Londoño-Murcia

link to paper: 10.1371/journal.pone.0214522

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