Course Units

How-to-Advanced-SDM

This course is intended as a blended learning module, although the provided introductions, explanations and examples might be useful for self-study only, too.

01 SDM basics

Go through a brute force introduction into R, R Markdown, the RStudio IDE to get ready for solving the upcoming assignment problems and submitting your solutions.

02 SDM workflow

This unit provides an introduction to species distribution modeling, covering key steps from data preparation and model training to model quality assessment. It serves as your starting point for understanding and applying species distribution models.

03 Artificial landscapes

In this unit, you will generate artificial landscapes as environmental variables for SDM. You will learn how to construct neutral landscape models (NLMs) and explore designing of realistic environmental patterns. These artificial datasets will be used in the next unit to create virtual species.

04 Virtual species

In this unit, we will focus on virtual species as a tool for testing species distribution models. You will learn how to generate virtual species by defining their ecological preferences, and simulating their distributions. The virtual species will allow you to create controlled experiments to evaluate SDMs in your research project.

05 Your research project

This unit is all about your final team project. Think about your research question and create a project outline as basis for your project. To finish this course it is mandatory to submit the final team project.