Co-production of a software tool for field-scale species distribution modelling (fs-SDM) and mapping using local biodiversity records

总结：生物多样性是多功能景观提供的许多关键生态系统服务的基础，包括粮食和水安全以及人类健康和福祉。在景观决策过程中整合物种保护是1981年《野生动物与乡村法》的法律的要求，也是Defra 25年环境计划的关键目标。立法规定在规划过程中减轻对生物多样性的影响，并将很快要求在所有发展项目中实行生物多样性净收益政策。只有在生态学家确定了将受到拟议发展负面影响的物种后，才有可能提供缓解措施，以减少或消除影响。然而，在更精细的尺度上，大多数物种在大多数地点出现的准确位置并不清楚。规划决策通常是在实地尺度上做出的，优先物种的风险通常通过对规划建议进行本地物种出现记录的筛选来确定。在一个地点没有记录通常被认为表明该物种的缺乏，但这是一个严重的错误，误以为证据的缺乏证据的缺乏。初步分析表明，在1公顷分辨率的明显缺席的很大一部分是假缺席。这些虚假缺席的后果是在景观决策过程中削弱了对生物多样性的保护，并在规划过程中相对较晚才发现需要减缓时增加了项目成本。为了有效保护生物多样性的景观决策，必须提供关于物种分布的实地信息，特别是需要特殊法律的保护的优先物种。随着技术进步消除了报告实地观察的许多障碍，生物多样性数据现在正在流入在线档案。例如，康沃尔和锡利群岛环境记录中心（ERCCIS）拥有超过650万个物种记录。绝大多数生物记录都是偶然收集的，没有严格的统计抽样策略。这些记录在地理和分类覆盖范围方面都以质换量，为绘制物种分布的高分辨率地图提供了潜在的信息基础。物种分布模型（SDM）可用于从相对稀疏的调查数据推断物种在景观中的分布。然而，这些模型必须开发相当谨慎，以产生无偏估计的物种分布机会records.Through这个研究翻译奖学金，我将导致一个用户友好的软件工具，以实现现场规模的物种分布建模（fs-SDM）和映射的基础上，当地的生物多样性记录的共同生产。我将与ERCCIS的工作人员一起工作，ERCCIS是该地区首屈一指的生物信息整理，管理和传播机构。该项目将释放这一巨大资源的潜力，并为ERCCIS工作人员和其他英国生物记录中心的工作人员提供工具集，以便在传播之前为这些记录增值。fs-SDM软件包将获取从业者的物种特定的专家知识来建立模型，但自动化建模过程本身，包括空间数据的获取和处理，以及模型的优化和评估。最后，产出易于解释至关重要，将与相关最终用户密切合作开发，以确保产出的清晰度和可信度。该软件将通过在线档案免费提供下载，以增加实地规模建模和绘图能力，支持景观决策。

Summary: Research Translation Fellowship.Biodiversity underpins many of the key ecosystem services provided by multifunctional landscapes, including food and water security and human health and wellbeing. The integration of species protection within the landscape decisions process is a legal requirement under the Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981 and a key goal of Defra's 25-year Environment Plan. Legislation mandates mitigation of impacts to biodiversity in the planning process and will soon require a policy of net gain for biodiversity in all development projects. It is only possible to provide mitigation to reduce or remove impacts if ecologists have identified the species that will be negatively affected by a proposed development. However, the precise location of species occurrence at finer scales is not known for the majority of species across the majority of locations.Planning decisions are typically made at field-scales and risks to priority species are often identified at these scales through the screening of local species occurrence records against planning proposals. The absence of records at a site is typically assumed to indicate the absence of the species, but this is a critical error, mistaking the absence-of-evidence for the evidence-of-absence. Preliminary analyses showing that a large proportion of apparent absences at a 1-hectare resolution are false absences. The consequence of these false absences is the weakening of protections for biodiversity in the landscape decisions process and an increase in project costs when the need for mitigation is discovered relatively late in the planning process. For landscape decisions to protect biodiversity effectively, field-scale information on the distribution of species must be available, particularly for priority species requiring special legal protection. Biodiversity data is now streaming into online archives as technological advances have removed many of the barriers to reporting field observations. For example, the Environmental Records Centre for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (ERCCIS) holds more than 6.5 million species records. The vast majority of biological records are collected opportunistically, without a statistically rigorous sampling strategy. Trading-off quality for quantity, both in terms of geographic and taxonomic coverage, these records provide a potential information base to develop high-resolution maps of species distributions. Species distribution models (SDMs) can be used to infer the distribution of a species across a landscape from relatively sparse survey data. These models must however be developed with considerable care in order to produce unbiased estimates of species distributions from opportunistic records.Through this Research Translation Fellowship, I will lead the co-production of a user-friendly software tool to implement field-scale species distribution modelling (fs-SDM) and mapping based on local biodiversity records. I will work alongside staff at the ERCCIS, the region's premier accredited organisation for collating, managing, and disseminating biological information. This project will unleash the potential of this vast resource and provide the toolset for ERCCIS staff, and staff at other UK biological record centres, to add-value to these records prior to dissemination. The fs-SDM package will capture the practitioner's species-specific expert knowledge to build models, but automate the modelling process itself, including the acquisition and processing of spatial data, and the optimisation and evaluation of the models. Finally, the production of easily interpretable outputs is critical and this will be developed in close collaboration with relevant end-users to ensure there is clarity and confidence in the outputs. The software will be made freely available for download via online archives to increase the availability of field-scale modelling and mapping capacity to support landscape decisions.