Introducing Open Modeller - A fundamental niche modelling framework

Introduction In 1957 Hutchinson (4) formalised the fundamental niche principle. In essence, he proposed that if all the environmental conditions that allow a species to exist indefinately could be tabulated as a multidimensional hypercube, then the resulting hypercube could be considered to be the organismâ??s fundamental ecological niche. Naturally, fully understanding all the ecological conditions for any given species is a monumental task, limited primarily by the lack of rich data that could drive such an analysis. By extrapolation of the association between species occurrence localities and a set of GIS raster layers representing environmental conditions such as rainfall, temperature, solar radiation etc., a correlative approach can be taken towards describing an organismâ??s ecological niche (10). Using this technique, a raster layer can be produced with areas that most resemble the environmental conditions at the original known sites of occurrence for the organism. Arguably, this approach first garnered widespread interest with the publication of â??A biogeographic analysis of Australian Elapid snakes.â?? (5), where the authors produced predicted distribution maps for Elapid snakes based on simple models of climatic preference. As the world starts to engage more fully in the discussion of the potential impacts of global climate change, the abillity to predict the impact of these changes on the distribution of organisms has become more topical. Fundamental niche modelling has been used to predict species loss in the face of future climate changes (12; 2). It has also been used to model invasive species, spread of disease vectors (6) and in phylogenetic modelling to produce distribution maps for hypothetical ancestors (13; 14).