ABSTRACT
There is concern that some species may be threatened if they are not able to migrate fast enough to keep up with shifting climate patterns or become disjunct from other mutualistic species such as pollinators. This chapter will explore these issues by modeling the relationships between tree species and climate in mountains of the Pacific Northwest and analyzing how species distributions may change under a future climate change scenario. Three new packages will be used in this chapter. They are spatstat package, dismo package and ROCR package. It encompasses the Cascade Mountain Range in Washington State. This area includes three ecoregions: the Cascades, East Cascades, and North Cascades. One way to try to see the occurrence patterns more clearly is to compute kernel-weighted local means. The WorldClim dataset will be used to analyse relationships between tree species and climate. Worldclim is a downscaled global climate dataset available as a 1000 m grid that captures fine-scale variation associated with elevation.
