Several members of the Scheffers Lab, including myself, headed down to Bonita Springs in South Florida for the 2023 Species on the Move Conference. This was the third conference in this series, and drew about 300 attendees from (by my rough guess) 35 nations or so. The theme of this conference series is exploring how, where, and why species are shifting their spatial distributions due to global change.
The conference kicked off with a few one-day workshops, including one that I led on microclimate modeling, with assistance from Luke Evans, Rebecca Senior, and Lydia Soifer. We covered some of the basic physical principles underlying most mechanistic microclimate models, and then walked through code I had provided for implementing the microclimc, microclimf models, driving them with ERA5 climate data extracted with mcera5.
The conference itself presented a wonderful opportunity to network with others in the community exploring species’ shifting ranges. Many in attendance were modelers synthesizing findings using species distribution models (SDMs) for many species at once, to explore the re-assembly of biodiversity with climate change and habitat loss.
A great time in a beautiful venue!
Labmate Dr. Alex Baecher presents on his research exploring global landscape connectivity.