Species Distribution Modelling (SDM) quantitatively assesses the relationship between species and environmental data using a range of modelling frameworks to understand and predict the distribution of species in both current and future geographic space. Statisticians and ecologists at Aberystwyth University working with a Geographic Information System (GIS) and spatial analysis specialists at University College Cork will carry out SDM on a range of datasets (including national surveys, citizen science projects, and telemetry data collected as part of the ECHOES project) for Eurasian curlew and Greenland White-fronted Goose.
SDM will offer insights into how the distributions of the two bird species vary across a range of geospatial variables. In addition, field survey data will be collected for both species including spatial information on their diet enabling scientists to build SDMs that will tell us about the habitat preferences of these species along the coast. Factoring climate prediction scenarios and land cover change into the SDMs will help to establish how the spatial and temporal distributions of the species may be changing over a time period of several decades.