Data

          The notable data acquired was threefold. Firstly, the whitebark pine data was acquired through the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation. The Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation is leading the effort to restore the species through the National Whitebark Pine Restoration Plan. The Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation offers many spatial datasets and layers, however, the large majority of them are limited only to the United States. All layers available were looked at, however, we used the “Existing” file, a geotiff layer of a existing whitebark pine distribution as it was the only one that offered us the northern (Canadian) section of whitebark pine in North America. 

          The second dataset represented sightings for Clark's Nutcracker across North America. The dataset was downloaded from gbif.org in the form of a tab delimited CSV. The dataset represented an agglomeration of smaller datasets from other sources, acting as a sort of master dataset with over 92,000 sightings. As a result of this, the table contained many columns that were unnecessary, and often were not present for some of the sightings. Luckily, all we needed was the longitude and latitude coordinates. 

          The third step in acquiring our data was to find climatic variables. For this, we used the historical climate data available on WorldClim. WorldClim offers data for multiple climatic variables for each month, however, for the sake of species distribution modeling, correlation between the environmental layers could bias the results. Therefore, we decided to use the standard 19 bioclimatic variables as well as the elevation raster. Originally, we had hoped to use the data at 30 seconds spatial resolution. But quickly realized due to the extent of this study and computational power, we needed to use the five minute scale data. 

          Additionally, we relied on an administrative boundaries layer for the Government of Canada in order to select for features within Alberta and British Columbia.