OOS 78

Predicting Range Shifts in Response to Ongoing Environmental Change Using Dynamic Modelling Approaches

Ecologists are frequently interested in understanding what limits the current distributions of species and predicting changes in these geographic distributions in response to environmental change, especially species invasions, habitat modification and climate change. To date, the majority of studies have relied on techniques that link environmental covariates to the observed distribution of one or more species at a single time point (i.e., static species distribution models). Increasingly techniques are being developed to model the processes that determine species distributions – factors such as colonization, dispersal, local extinction, and local population growth rates based on occurrence or count data. These techniques are less dependent on equilibrium assumptions and better suited for predicting the speed at which ranges shift in response to changing environmental conditions. In this session we seek to provide an overview of dynamic species distribution models and their application to specific case studies. In particular, we will show how factors such as species interactions, disease dynamics, climate change, and habitat dynamics have been incorporated into these approaches and how these approaches can be used to directly inform management decisions. Talks will cover a wide-range of approaches, including simple discrete Markov-chain models of species occurrence (i.e., dynamic occupancy models) to integrated modeling approaches that combine both count and demographic data to model population dynamics. The symposium will serve as a general overview of options for researchers interested in applying these approaches.