A standard protocol for reporting species distribution models

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Issue Date
2020-06-01Author
Zurell, Damaris
Franklin, Janet
König, Christian
Bouchet, Phil J.
Dormann, Carsten F.
Elith, Jane
Fandos, Guillermo
Feng, Xiao
Guillera-Arroita, Gurutzeta
Guisan, Antoine
Lahoz-Monfort, José J.
Leitão, Pedro J.
Park, Daniel S.
Peterson, A. Townsend
Rapacciuolo, Giovanni
Schmatz, Dirk R.
Schröder, Boris
Serra-Diaz, Josep M.
Thuiller, Wilfried
Yates, Katherine L.
Zimmermann, Niklaus E.
Merow, Cory
Publisher
Wiley Open Access
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
© 2020 The Authors. Ecography published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Nordic Society Oikos. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.
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Show full item recordAbstract
Species distribution models (SDMs) constitute the most common class of models across ecology, evolution and conservation. The advent of ready-to-use software packages and increasing availability of digital geoinformation have considerably assisted the application of SDMs in the past decade, greatly enabling their broader use for informing conservation and management, and for quantifying impacts from global change. However, models must be fit for purpose, with all important aspects of their development and applications properly considered. Despite the widespread use of SDMs, standardisation and documentation of modelling protocols remain limited, which makes it hard to assess whether development steps are appropriate for end use. To address these issues, we propose a standard protocol for reporting SDMs, with an emphasis on describing how a study's objective is achieved through a series of modeling decisions. We call this the ODMAP (Overview, Data, Model, Assessment and Prediction) protocol, as its components reflect the main steps involved in building SDMs and other empirically-based biodiversity models. The ODMAP protocol serves two main purposes. First, it provides a checklist for authors, detailing key steps for model building and analyses, and thus represents a quick guide and generic workflow for modern SDMs. Second, it introduces a structured format for documenting and communicating the models, ensuring transparency and reproducibility, facilitating peer review and expert evaluation of model quality, as well as meta-analyses. We detail all elements of ODMAP, and explain how it can be used for different model objectives and applications, and how it complements efforts to store associated metadata and define modelling standards. We illustrate its utility by revisiting nine previously published case studies, and provide an interactive web-based application to facilitate its use. We plan to advance ODMAP by encouraging its further refinement and adoption by the scientific community.
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Citation
Zurell, D., Franklin, J., König, C., Bouchet, P.J., Dormann, C.F., Elith, J., Fandos, G., Feng, X., Guillera-Arroita, G., Guisan, A., Lahoz-Monfort, J.J., Leitão, P.J., Park, D.S., Peterson, A.T., Rapacciuolo, G., Schmatz, D.R., Schröder, B., Serra-Diaz, J.M., Thuiller, W., Yates, K.L., Zimmermann, N.E. and Merow, C. (2020), A standard protocol for reporting species distribution models. Ecography, 43: 1261-1277. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.04960
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