Global Online Seminar #37 - Wallace
Channel: A. Townsend Peterson
Date: 2018-05-09

Our 37th Global Online Seminar in Biodiversity Informatics will be held on May 9 at 0900, Kansas time (GMT-5).

Title: Wallace: a reproducible, expandable, and interactive interface for guided modeling of species niches and distributions
 
Bio: Jamie M. Kass is a doctoral candidate at City University of New York, supervised by Dr. Robert P. Anderson. His thesis work focuses on different ways to incorporate biotic interactions into species distribution models, on a variety of systems: parapatric spiny pocket mice in South America, migrating monarch butterflies in Mexico and their food and shelter plants, and invasive raccoons in Japan and their potential competitors. He is also the lead developer of the application Wallace, which he will be discussing today.
 
Description: Jamie will be discussing and giving a demonstration of Wallace, a GUI-based application for ecological modeling currently focusing on modeling species niches and distributions. Wallace has a number of defining features that make it a good example of next-generation ecological software. Wallace is open as the code is free to use and modify and gives users access to online biodiversity databases; expandible as users can author and contribute modules that enable new methodogical options; flexible as there are many options for alternative analyes as well as user uploads and downloads; interactive as it has a zoomable map, sortable tables, and visualizations of results; instructive as it has guidance text that educates users about each step in the workflow; and reproducible as users can download a readable R script that reruns the analysis. The Wallace team currently is working with various external partners to hone the process of adding new modules to the application. This talk is geared towards ecologists of all levels of programming and modeling experience, and we value feedback from a variety of users.