Linking biodiversity occurrence data to the physical and biotic environment provides a framework to formulate hypotheses about the ecological processes governing spatial and temporal patterns in biodiversity, which can be useful for marine ecosystem management and conservation. Bio-ORACLE offers a user-friendly solution to accomplish this task by providing 19 global geophysical, biotic and climate layers at a common spatial resolution (5 arcmin) and a uniform landmask.

The goal of MarineSPEED is to provide a benchmark data set for presence-only species distribution modeling (SDM) in order to facilitate reproducible and comparable SDM research. It contains species occurrences (coordinates) from a wide diversity of marine species and associated environmental data from Bio-ORACLE and MARSPEC. Some additional information about MarineSPEED can be found in the R Shiny viewer at https://rshiny.lifewatch.be/marinespeed/.

NICHE Vlaanderen (Nature Impact Assessment of Changes in Hydro-Ecological Systems) is a hydro-ecological model that predicts the potential occurrence of (ground)water-dependent vegetation types in an area based on information about the (abiotic) site conditions. NICHE Vlaanderen can be used to evaluate the impact of changes in the water management to groundwater-dependent vegetation. The model is based on a number of location factors that are important for the vegetation: soil type, hydrology, nutrient availability and acidity. Based on calculated abiotic properties of the location NICHE Vlaanderen determines whether certain vegetation types can develop. An additional flooding module allows the user to test whether the predicted vegetations are compatible with a particular flooding regime. This project is a redevelopment of an existing ArcGIS plugin in Python, without external non-open source dependencies.

The goal of sdmpredictors is to make environmental data, commonly used for species distribution modelling (SDM), also called ecological niche modelling (ENM) or habitat suitability modelling, easy to use in R. sdmpredictors gives access to several environmental datasets, including the the Bio-ORACLE Marine Data Layers for Bioclimatic Modelling. LifeWatch hosts the website https://www.bio-oracle.org/ and supports the development of these layers. The package contains methods for getting downloading raster data for the current climate but also for future and paleo climatic conditions. These rasters and then loaded into R.