Preparing the Environmental Layers for Species Distribution Modelling
Part 1
For this group of exercises (6, 7 and 8), species distribution modelling is demonstrated using Maxent (Philipps et al., 2006) to show how to produce the suitability maps for a species based on its occurrence and environmental layers for the area covered.
Downloading Bioclim Data and processing in ArcMap
- The Bioclim files are found at http://worldclim.org/download
- Click on Current conditions select the Generic grid->30 second resolution->Bioclim 1-9 & 10-18 and the available Tiles will come up
- Click on 411 which contains New Zealand; unzip the resulting download
- Open a new Arcmap, set the projection to WGS84 and add the New Zealand coastline shapefile (nzcoast.shp) and the unzipped Bioclim layers
- Use ModelBuilder to define the Bioclim layer projections and clip to the NZ coastline.