2023 Theses Bachelor's
Comparison of two species distribution modeling approaches for the conservation of marine species in Colombia
Species distribution models (SDMs) are valuable tools used in biogeography, ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation. They can estimate the potential distribution of a species using occurrence data and environmental variables. Historically, development of marine SDM methods has been delayed compared to the terrestrial realm because of limited environmental and other data availability. With environmental datasets newly available for the marine realm, research and development of SDMs are starting to grow. This study focused on two novel SDM approaches, Wallace and voluModel. Studies to model marine species using these tools are limited. Additionally, few studies have modeled species distribution of marine fishes in Colombia. I performed a comparative study to determine the distribution of marine fish species in Colombia and to assess the performance of each tool by using three model performance metrics: area under the curve (AUC), Akaike information criterion (AIC), and omission error (OR), along with expert feedback. This project is part of a collaborative effort led by Colombia's Institute of Marine and Coastal Research (INVEMAR) and the BioModelos team from the Humboldt Research Institute to map the species distribution of Colombia’s biodiversity. This effort is related to Colombia’s compromise to adopt the Global Biodiversity Framework established at COP15 in 2023. One of the 23 targets of this framework includes increasing the number of global ecosystems and species under management and conservation to 30% in both land and sea by 2030. For this reason, there is an urgent need to scale up knowledge of marine fish distributions to inform a new edition of The Red Book of Marine Fish in Colombia by the end of 2023. This study will inform the choice of software used by INVEMAR and BioModelos to model the ecological distribution of marine fishes in Colombia.
Keywords: Biogeography, Ecology, Conservation, R (Programming language), Marine fish, Species distribution model, Environmental niche model, Wallace EcoMod, voluModel
Geographic Areas
Files
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FinalDraft_VeronicaMartinez.pdf application/pdf 992 KB Download File
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- Environmental Biology
- Thesis Advisors
- Lawrence, Jenna Mara
- Degree
- B. A., Columbia University
- Published Here
- September 9, 2024