Report from the business trip, Portugal, Soto

Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are growing in importance in the face of climate change, and understanding the response of species to climate change has become a priority for biodiversity conservation worldwide. In addition, these models are also widely utilised to assess the growing threat of biological invasion because can predict the potential distribution of the invasive species for the current and different future climate change sceneries based on greenhouse gas concentration pathway scenarios. Thus, SDMs can help to identify the regions where the efforts should be prioritised to minimise the potential impacts of biological invasions.

From November 7 to 13, Ismael Soto participated in the 8^th edition of the Species Distributions Modelling course led by Professors Miguel Bastos Araujo and Babak Naimi in Evora (Portugal). In this course, we learned the fundamental concepts underpinning SDMs, describing some of the most prominent methods currently in use, and discussing the strengths and limitations of these models for different applications. In addition, we learned how to build the SDMs in the statistical software Rstudio using the package “sdm” built by the lecturers. Finally, we successfully built SDMs for 17 cetaceans species in the Atlantic Ocean for the current and three different potential climate change scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5) for two different periods (2050 and 2070).