Species distribution online application

This is online software created to build Species Distribution Models (SDM) and compute maps of potential species habitat suitability. The software works in two modes. Firstly you can provide table of coordinates or secondly you can select species from DaLiBor database.

For basic information about species distribution modeling (SDM) in plants conservation we recommend this paper: Using species distribution models to predict new occurrences for rare plants.

To get some general knowledge about species distribution modeling, we recommend this book: Mapping Species Distributions.

Create new prediction task from CSV table

Create new prediction task from DaLiBor records

As a result, you will get the raster map showing the relative habitat suitability of your species. The map is based on environmental factors – see below. Resulting raster map is suitable to be used in GIS software. From the resulting map you can easily filter the hot spots of habitat suitability to target field studies.

This software is running in R, using library “caret”. Software offers two species distribution modelling algorithms: Generalized Linear Model (GLM) and machine learning technique: Random forest (ranger). You must specify prediction map area and in coordinates mode, you must specify whether you provided presence and absence or presence only. In case of presence only, you can say how many pseudo-absence generate to generate.

Main advantage of this software is the environmental data we can offer. Currently the software uses eleven environmental layers covering whole are of the Czech Republic. We prepared topographic grids with the resolution of 10 m and long therm climatic grids with the resolution of 500 m. Both data sets are standardized to the cell size of 10 m. Your prediction map will be the cell size of 10 m, coordinate system of WGS 84 / UTM zone 33N, EPSG:32633.

Environmental data used by the software:

• Convergence Index with search radius of 50 m
• Diurnal anisotropic heating
• Slope [radian]
• Topographic position index with search radius 50 m
• Topographic wetness index
• Vertical distance to channel network


• Yearly sum precipitation 2014 – 2019
• Yearly mean air temperature 2014 – 2019
• Yearly maximum air temperature 2014 – 2019
• Yearly minimum air temperature 2014 – 2019

We are preparing also habitat type layers, geological layers or forest characteristics layers. Coming soon.

This online software were produced at the department of GIS and remote sensing, Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Contact: matej.man@ibot.cas.cz

For more technical see code and technical description on GitHub

This software was developed with financial support of Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TAČR).