[seek-dev] Report on SCB meeting

[David Stockwell]

Hi All,

Just a short report on the Society for Conservation Biology at
Columbia University in NYC I attended last week where I gave a talk in a 
Symposia
*What Do Species Distribution Models Add to Conversvation Biology*
called WHYWHERE? – AN ADVANCED SURROGATE-BASED MODELING APPROACH.

There was a lot of interest, given the small group four years ago when I 
spoke, there
was a large group of interested people which probably has to do with a 
lot of high
profile papers coming out in this area now. There were question about 
the WhyWhere
algorithm, particularly the capacity to download a cropped region for 
almost 1000
variables from a remote data store and use it in analysis, and the 
algorithm and how
it fit into the information infrastructure, and about overfitting and 
how to control it.
I think this could be a real growth area given more searching capability 
and continuously increasing
stores of data.

I showed a slide of the various institutions in SEEK and talked a bit 
about integration
and the grid approach. In general I was struck by the growing 
realization that this
is relevant to conservation and could have something useful for them, 
though at the
moment is a very small part of overall concerns with reserve design, 
population
issues and habitat maintainence, based on personal survey data. There 
has been an
upsurge in satellite imagry available to them particularly in remote 
places, and this
would be good to get incorporated into the online data stores.

The WhyWhere application is downloadable and I am working with a few people
on studies. We have the SRB connection working well for downloading the
cropped sections of data files, and need to fill it out with browsing 
and searching
capability, and more user flexibility in configuring exacly what 
variables they want
for their analysis.

Cheers


-- 
David R.B. Stockwell, PhD
Assistant Research Scientist
University of California, San Diego
San Diego Supercomputer Center, MC 0505
9500 Gilman Dr, Bldg 109
La Jolla, CA 92093-0505
Tel: 858 8220942
Fax: 858 5345056
Web: http://biodi.sdsc.edu
Email: davids at sdsc.edu