Master's Project (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2018Species distribution models (SDMs) describe the relationship between where a species occurs and underlying environmental conditions. For this project, I created SDMs for the five tree species that occur in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve (YUCH) in order to gain insight into which environmental covariates are important for each species, and what effect each environmental condition has on that species' expected occurrence or abundance. I discuss some of the issues involved in creating SDMs, including whether or not to incorporate spatially explicit error terms, and if so, how to do so with generalized linear models (GLMs, which have discrete responses). I ran a total of 10 distinct geostatistical SDMs using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (Bayesian methods), and discuss the results here. I also compare these results from YUCH with results from a similar analysis conducted in Denali National Park and Preserve (DNPP)
