Can we use species distribution modeling to structure species co-occurrence?

Investigator: 
Chia-Ying Ko
Start Date: 
March, 2013
Description: 

Species distribution modeling is widely used in ecology and conservation.  Generally, people focus on single species distributions and focus on relationships between their distributions and environments as well as potential distributional changes under climate change. However, species distribution modeling has been little used at a community or ecosystem level due to a lack of species interaction knowledge. Therefore, we plan to use 4-5 species of New England with known interaction to explore:

  1. Can species distribution modeling structure species co-occurrence patterns?
  2. What kinds of species interaction should we particularly consider in the species distribution modeling?