Species distributions and habitat suitability
The very pillars of biogeography, going back to McArthur and Wilson, are cemented upon demographic processes (e.g. invasion and extinction). However, most current models attempting to describe where species are found, and where they may shift towards, geographically, do not incorporate demographic information. Importantly, some of these latter tools, such as species distribution models (SDMs) have been criticised for being highly environmentally correlational and being prone to mistakes due to their reliance on presence-only data and detectability issues.
The SalGo team is developing methods to incorporate demographic information, both from big-data databases, as well as from individually collected sites, to build more robust spatially explicit predictions of species distributions.
