Recent decades have seen an explosion of interest in species distribution modeling. This has resulted from a confluence of the growing need for information on the geographical distribution of biodiversity and new and improved techniques and data suitable for addressing this information need – remote sensing, global positioning system technology, geographic information systems, and statistical learning methods. Developments in this area are occurring so rapidly that it was difficult to know when to stop writing this book. It is very challenging to write about a moving target. For the same reason, however, it was the right time to summarize the foundations of, and recent developments in this enterprise called species distribution modeling (SDM). This book provides an introduction to SDM for beginners in the field and for those wishing to use such models in environmental assessment and biodiversity conservation, while providing a significant reference on current practice for researchers.

In this Part, Chapter 1 establishes some basic terminology used to describe species' distribution modeling, describes a framework for implementing SDM that will be used as an organizing principle for the book, and reviews the problems and applications that have motivated a growing interest in SDM. Much of this book describes a modeling approach that links species location information with environmental data (Part II) in order to quantify the distributions of species on environmental gradients and map those distributions onto geographical space using a model (Part III).