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Species distribution modeling in the cloud
Author(s) -
Candela Leonardo,
Castelli Donatella,
Coro Gianpaolo,
Pagano Pasquale,
Sinibaldi Fabio
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.3030
Subject(s) - cloud computing , computer science , process (computing) , data science , software , distribution (mathematics) , species distribution , set (abstract data type) , data mining , ecology , mathematical analysis , mathematics , habitat , biology , programming language , operating system
Summary Species distribution modeling is a process aiming at computationally predicting the distribution of species in geographic areas on the basis of environmental parameters including climate data. Such a quantitative approach has a lot of potentialities in many areas that include setting up conservation priorities, testing biogeographic hypotheses, and assessing the impact of accelerated land use. To further promote the diffusion of such an approach, it is fundamental to develop a flexible, comprehensive, and robust environment capable of enabling practitioners and communities of practice to produce species distribution models more efficiently. A promising way to build such an environment is offered by modern infrastructures promoting the sharing of resources, including hardware, software, data, and services. This paper describes an approach to species distribution modeling based on a Hybrid Data Infrastructure that can offer a rich array of data and data management services by leveraging other infrastructures (including Cloud). It discusses the whole set of services needed to support the phases of such a complex process including access to occurrence records and environmental parameters and the processing of such information to predict the probability of a species’ occurrence in given areas.Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.