This is the repost of an article we wrote for the Ecography blog In 1990, Stuart H. Hurlbert analysed the “Spatial Distribution of the Montane Unicorn”. The Montane Unicorn was a rare organism, at that time only recently described, and Hurlbert was the first to report data on this singular species. His data showed that unicorn populations had extremely unusual and varying abundance distributions. He therefore analysed these abundance distributions.. Read More

Environmental destruction hastens as human population increases, and current efforts are unlikely to improve indicator trends. Intuitively, one may consider reducing human population size by a reduction in fertility as one of the most urgent actions to undertake to ensure our future on this planet. It is already the case in developed countries, which have access to contraception, or more drastically in China, with the one-child policy. However, most populations.. Read More

Everybody knows Schrödinger’s cat. That famous cat that would be both dead and alive according to a quantic model. We can make an analogy with predictions of climate change impacts on species distributions. Most of these predictions were done using species distribution models (SDMs). The problem is that SDMs are rather uncertain techniques. A small technical definition Technically, SDMs consist in correlating the occurrence of a species (i.e., places where.. Read More