Week 8: Exploring production-grade SDM software
Icebreaker
What is the grossest or creepiest creature you can think of? (This is a 2 part question).
Paper discussion
- Hao will be leading the discussion of Aguirre-Liguor et al 2021 "The evolutionary genomics of species’ responses to climate change"
- Meg will be leading a discussion of True et al 2021 "Forecasting the distribution of a range-expanding bat reveals future response to climate change and habitat"
Lab Exercise: The MaxEnt model and more advanced SDM topics
Concepts
- MaxEnt the Original SDM model
- Geographically Aware Train/test data splitting
- Cross-validation
- Prediction evaluation; Area under the curve (AUC)
Applied Lab
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Next, the usual intro update exercise: Go to your JupyterHub and pull the latest version of the class github repository.
Python Tools
Assignment
Complete the elapid workflow for another Maine amphibian. Submit a notebook with background-sampling maps, climate comparisons, sample weights, ROC curves, and a comparison of training and checkerboard test AUCs, plus the saved modeling points and AUC summary table.
Paper discussion leader next week: Liz! Please select a paper for the group to discuss before Sunday 10/25 6pm and send it around to the class email list: bio597-fall2026-group@maine.edu