Sitka spruce is among the many species that spread outside areas they are planted, and a key aim of the thesis is to evaluate the nature of this spread: do sitkas spread rapidly or slowly, and which ecosystems could they establish in?
Julien Vollering's thesis presents an R package (MIAmaxent) that can be used to understand the ecology in the Sitka native range and forecast spread from these relationships, as well as a method to handle spatial bias in occurrence data. He also quantifies spread into differently-exposed ecosystems, and identifies bottlenecks to potential further spread.
Julien Vollering has been co-supervised by the NHM and Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.
The event was held as a physical-digital hybrid.
