Teaching

SDM course (i.e., Species Distributional Modeling with R) was developed and offered to graduate student in Department of Entomology at Washington State University in Spring 2023. This class time is divided between lectures and R practices. Students are anticipated to get familiar with invasive species, niche and distribution modelling, and could develop ecological niche models to predict potential distributions of invasive pests that are concern in the Pacific Northwest, the results will also be used to develop into a manuscript. Students are also expected to develop and work on an instructor approved project. This class covered both ecological theory (50%) and hand-on practice with R (50%), there will be 15 classes each takes about 1.5h. Student could anticipate from this class: (1) Getting familiar with “NICHE” concept; (2) An improved skill in R and spatial analysis; (3) Develop a species distribution model in R; (4) Develop a manuscript together as a team;

Here is the schedule and course type (Theory (T), Practice (P), Discussion (D)):

1. Brief intro to Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM), brief intro to GIS (T,D)

​2. Characteristics & sources of species’ occurrence data, Species occurrence data for ENM (T,P); involving package: spocc, rgbif

3. Characteristics & sources of environmental data, Processing environmental data (T,P); involving package: raster, terra, daymet

4. Insect distribution across space, Niche and Distribution, Species distributional modeling (T,D), BAM framework

5. Maxent-practice (T,P), involving package: Maxent demo, dismo

6. SDM in R I: mechanistic model (P); CLIMEX in R, involving package: NichemapR

7. SDM in R II: Correlative models, ensemble models (P); involving package: Biomod2, sdm, flexSDM

8. Model Thresholding and Evaluation (T,D); Sensitivity, Specificity, ROC, AUC, pROC, TSS

9. Model Complexity-tune model predictions (T,D); involving package: SDMtune, kuenm, flexsdm

10. Web based platforms for SDMs (T,P), involving package: Wallace, ntbox, ShinyBiomod

11. SDM Applications- Biological invasion and Climate change (T,D), MESS, MOP, model transferring

12. Insect dispersal simulation (T,P), involving package: MigClim, RangeShifter

13. Developing model together I (P)

14. Developing model together II (P)

15. Developing manuscript together (P)