Biodiversity Data Use

An ecological niche model is an equation or set of equations that describe the ecological niche of a species. Niche modeling essentially does quantitatively, what natural historians do qualitatively, predicting suitable habitat for a species in geographic space. Models identify the characteristics of where a species has been found or observed and use that information to predict where else might be suitable habitat. Modelling approaches allow for the inference of a species without the need for experimental manipualtion that may be too costly, logigistically impossible and/or unethical. These approaches also allow us to use existing data that we may have collected or observed ourselves, harvested from literature or obtained from data aggregators such as GBIF.