Week 4: Vector Spatial Analysis
Icebreaker
What is your favorite magical or mythological creature and why?
Introductory business
- Isaac's seminar will be this afternoon (09/25) at 4:30pm Eastern (sent the zoom link in email)
Paper discussion
- Elle will be leading the discussion this week of Wyatt et al 2021 "Ecological niche modelling and phylogeography reveal range shifts of pawpaw, a North American understorey tree"
Lab Exercise: Vector Spatial Analysis
- The usual intro update exercise: Go to your JupyterHub and pull the latest version of the class github repository.
Commands to pull the latest version of the class repository
- Change directory to your local copy of the course repo
- Pull the latest copy of 'upstream' which is my copy of the class website
- Push the changes to your own github repo
cd ~/BIO597-SpatialBiodiversity/` git upstream git push
Core Questions
- How can vector operations answer ecological and conservation questions?
- Which observations fall inside protected areas, watersheds, or habitat polygons?
- How do buffers, intersections, and spatial joins change the unit of analysis?
Concepts
- Spatial joins
- Intersection, union, and difference
- Buffers
- Nearest-neighbor operations
- Point-in-polygon analysis
- Distance matrices
Python Tools
- pandas
- GeoPandas
Applied Lab
Using species observations, protected areas, watersheds, roads, and habitat polygons, students ask which observations occur inside protected areas, how many species occur within 500 m of a road, and which sampling locations fall within each watershed.
Assignment
Submit a vector spatial analysis report with maps, code, and short interpretations for at least three spatial questions.
docs/assignments/Assignment-04-VectorSpatialAnalysis.ipynb
Paper discussion leader next week: Carly! Please select a paper for the group to discuss before Sunday 09/27 6pm and send it around to the class email list: bio597-fall2026-group@maine.edu