Assignment: Student tutorials

Get familiar with relevant references for SDM and prepare an HTML tutorial for a particular modelling technique.

Things you need for this assignment

References

Start with the excellent general overviews by Robert J. Hijmans and Jane Elith on www.rspatial.org and by Damaris Zurell on damariszurell.github.io.

Then continue with more specific literature on particular methods, for example:

• A practical guide to MaxEnt for modeling species’ distributions: what it does, and why inputs and settings matter,
• A review of evidence about use and performance of species distribution modelling ensembles like BIOMOD, or
• Predicting species distribution: offering more than simple habitat models.

Especially consider A standard protocol for reporting species distribution models, which can serve as a comprehensive guideline for your reproducible workflow.

Finally, get more specific by checking out the example unit with SDM tutorials created by former students as a rough guideline (direct link here.)

Data

Point data of the butterflies of Pakistan and Ladakh (PakistanLadakh.csv)) can be downloaded from the data folder in Ilias.

Deliverables

• Prepare a markdown-based HTML Tutorial for your individual SDM method and present it in the course. Use the provided point data on the occurrence of butterflies in Pakistan for creating a species richness map of butterflies for this country.
• Plan with 30 minutes minimum up to one hour for each tutorial presentation. The dates for the presentations can be found in the syllabus on the course front page.
• See also the respective deliverables page, here

Note that you will need to gather considerably more information to solve this task than provided in the input parts of this course. Note also that you do not need to understand every mathematical detail of your method but rather make your peers understand how your method is correctly applied with an appealing tutorial.

Only students from the Department of Geography at the University of Marburg with a stable internet connection need to deliver this assignment as part of their study programme. For them, this assignment will be marked.