BIOCLIM: The Pioneering SDM Package

With about one thousand publications produced each year, species distribution modeling (SDM) is one of the most active areas of ecological research. A new web page11 https://csiropedia.csiro.au/bioclim/ briefly outlines the first SDM package (BIOCLIM), which became available in Australia in 1984, and its continuing significance. The application of the package is illustrated using an example from a 1986 study of 78 elapid snake species (Fig. 1). The results of the 1986 BIOCLIM analysis based on 124 occurrences are compared with the 624 records currently available in the Atlas of Living Australia.22 https://spatial.ala.org.au Photo credit: iNaturalist, ？ Neville Hayes, CC‐BY‐NC‐Int license, some rights reserved. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ The brief description should provide a useful introduction to SDM for students. Variables and data, which have strong links to the pioneering BIOCLIM work, are still widely used. For example, many studies use a set of 19 bioclimatic variables created for BIOCLIM in 1996 and WorldClim bioclimatic data,33 www.worldclim.org/bioclim which were created using thin‐plate spline interpolation methods developed initially for BIOCLIM