Defining your research question, selecting and processing the data
Mapping species ranges is important, but any study seeking to understand species ranges must follow sensible steps to ensure that analyses are appropriate, and that the caveats and assumptions at each step are clearly understood. Any researcher should keep several questions explicitly in mind from the outset of their studies, and need to assess if the data exists, or can be collated to answer those questions (Figure 1).
  1. Defining the questions: What is being attempted, what data are needed, and do those data exist?
  2. Selecting appropriate data to use: What assumptions are you making, what limits exist in potential data use? For instance, can citizen science data be used for your specific aim, and if so how could such data be sufficiently cleaned to be reliable?
  3. Understanding the scale and representativeness: Are the data representative of the species and region under study?