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Niche Model for Vegetation Distribution in India
A niche model for potential vegetation distribution in India was created as a demonstration of the technique for the Indian National Symposium on creating a National Biodiversity and Ecosystem Informatics Infrastructure, which met January 30 - February 2, 2006. The niche model result (distribution map) was compared with coarse (10-min) NDVI satellite data for India, obtaining a correlation of .6 (r-squared). Given the coarse data, use of only two parameters, temperature and precipitation, and very general estimate of the response function, this match was quite good, demonstrating the value and simplicity of this technique. The data were processed from sources obtained from the "Global Ecosystem Database" which is online at the Natioinal Geophysical Data Center. Much better databases are available for more refined testing, but these coarse but good quality data were suitable for prototyping. The niche model is produced in MathCad (Mathsoft Inc.) and mapping was done in Idrisi (Clark University).
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