ID: 613 / 135

Category: Symposia

Track: Pending

Proposed Symposium Title: SPATIAL MODELLING OF PLANT NICHES AND DISTRIBUTIONS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Abstract: In a changing world where plant biodiversity is at high risk, conservation measures and transformation of how we interact with natural ecosystems are urgently needed for many purposes, such as assessing species threats, developing conservation guidelines, or anticipating climate change and biological invasion impacts (among others). These applications all require a refined understanding on how social-ecological systems respond to global changes. In this regard, spatial distribution models are increasingly used tools to understand and explain species' current ecological niches and geographic distributions, as well as to forecast future changes and accordingly estimate species potential vulnerability. Species distribution models (SDMs) have already proven useful in supporting threatened plants conservation strategies, forest restoration, protected areas design, or invasive alien plant risk assessments. Yet, one of the biggest challenges that still needs to be better accounted for is to better quantify the uncertainty in spatial predictions. The magnitude, significance and complexity of this uncertainty depends on many aspects, such as the input data (species and environmental), modelling techniques/approaches, model evaluation and spatial predictions. In this symposium, we are looking for contributions presenting original ideas, frameworks and/or applications to identify, quantify, display, and reduce uncertainty in spatial models and predictions. Contributions improving spatial modelling of plant niches and distributions, in general, are also very welcome.

Speaker 1: Dr Rubén G. Mateo Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Departamento de Biología, Calle Darwin 2, ES-28049, Madrid, Spain rubeng.mateo@uam.es How to predict plant distributions at different spatial and time scales?

Speaker 2: Prof Antoine Guisan Lausanne University, Department of Ecology and Evolution, Biophore Building, CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland antoine.guisan@unil.ch Uncertainty in future species distribution caused by niche truncation

Speaker 3: Dr Joana Vicente CIBIO, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, InBIO Laboratório Associado, Campus de Vairão, Universidade do Porto, 4485-661 Vairão, Portugal jsvicente@cibio.up.pt Modelling landscape invasion by alien plants: challenges and applications

Topics (Up to three): Bioinformatics

Topic 2: Global Change Ecology

Topic 3: Biogeography

Justification: Due to the large number of botanical topics covered by the conference, the potential audience for this specific symposium is potentially large. It is a multi-disciplinary research area which is increasingly used to support plant taxonomy and phylogeny, plant ecology, plant evolution, global change forecast, conservation measures, monitoring etc. Dr R.G. Mateo is a young PI based in Madrid, Spain. Prof A. Guisan is worldwide-recognized expert in species niche and distribution models based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Dr J Vicente is a Postdoctoral researcher based in Porto, Portugal. The team consists of two men and one woman.