Preparing the Environmental Layers for Species Distribution Modelling

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Part 1

For this group of exercises (6, 7 and 8), species distribution modelling is demonstrated using Maxent (Philipps et al., 2006) to show how to produce the suitability maps for a species based on its occurrence and environmental layers for the area covered.

Downloading Bioclim Data and processing in ArcMap
    1. The Bioclim files are found at http://worldclim.org/download
    2. Click on Current conditions select the Generic grid->30 second resolution->Bioclim 1-9 & 10-18 and the available Tiles will come up
    3. Click on 411 which contains New Zealand; unzip the resulting download
    4. Open a new Arcmap, set the projection to WGS84 and add the New Zealand coastline shapefile (nzcoast.shp) and the unzipped Bioclim layers
    5. Use ModelBuilder to define the Bioclim layer projections and clip to the NZ coastline.

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