One of the most fundamental questions underpinning biodiversity conservation is: Where do species and ecosystems occur? Common decisions in conservation, including land and water acquisition priorities, the location and approach for restoration projects, and the degree of protection conferred to a species or habitat rely on accurate spatial depictions of the range-wide distribution of species and ecosystems. Through advances in dynamic ecological modeling, cloud-based computing, and innovative workflows that leverage community science, refined maps of species distributions can dramatically improve the basis for effective and strategic conservation actions, from local to landscape scales. Dr. Healy Hamilton, Chief Scientist at NatureServe, will demonstrate an iterative and collaborative ecological modelling process for producing refined species and ecosystem distributions, and provide example applications for their relevance to conservation actions.
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