ModelEco: Integrated Software for Species Distribution Analysis and Modeling

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The University of California at Merced is awarded a grant to develop ModelEco, a freely available and user-friendly software that enables researchers and students to fully and easily explore the rapidly increasing wealth of species distribution data. ModelEco will consist of four major components: data management and visualization, feature analysis, model training and prediction, and accuracy assessment. The proposed tools will incorporate a range of methods for species niche modeling as well as several feature selection methods to improve the prediction accuracy. This combination of features will foster better understanding of the relationship between species distribution and environmental variables. Spatial uncertainty of both species localities and environmental layers will be taken into consideration for the first time to improve spatial prediction of species distributions. The development of these tools will result in greater participation in species distribution modeling and its related activities in conservation, monitoring, planning, and climate change research and education. By creating tools that are free and easy to use, course and curriculum development will be fostered. With the proposed software, users will easily be able to appreciate the value of data quality, to understand the limitations of the data at hand, and to get guidance to obtain additional data necessary to answer priority-based questions.