Environmental Information: Placing Biodiversity Phenomena in an Ecological and Environmental Context

Abstract

Environmental models are increasingly being used as surrogates to determine plant and animal species’ distributions for a range of uses. This use of models has become an important part of the recent science that has become known as biodiversity informatics. Because of the nature of species data, considerable effort has often been spent in managing the quality of those species data, but less time has generally been spent on determining the quality and efficacy of the environmental data against which the species data are being modeled. This paper examines a range of environmental data being used in species distribution modeling, and looks at how they are prepared, their quality and use, and some of the commonly encountered pitfalls and problems in using these data in species’ distribution modeling.