Modeling and Implementation of a Geospatial Database for Environmental Niches and Potential Geographic Distributions

The ecological niche of a species is defined by an array of biotic and abiotic requirements that allow organisms to live and reproduce in a geographic region. Abiotic data from the ecological niche in combination with occurrence data can be used to predict the potential geographic distribution of a species in different regions. Potential geographic distributions are useful in predicting the extent of invasive species, predict distributions as preparation for climate change and find appropriate regions for endangered species, among others. Geographic entities and environmental variables can be represented with a high-level abstraction in diagrams using formalism dedicated to model geospatial databases. The schemas produced by these formalisms can later be transformed into implementation code using software-design approaches such as the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA). This work describes the stages of MDA to generate geospatial databases for ecological niches and potential geographic distributions data. The paper also presents a study case, estimating the potential distribution of the tree Myracrodruon urundeuva, to show how professionals and researches can use the proposed schema to implement a repository for ecological niche and potential distributions data.