I have been involved in a couple of projects during my undergraduate years where I leant to use species Distribution Models (SDMs), also called Ecological Niche Models (ENMs) to predict the suitable habitats for plant and small mammal species. In the first project which was carried out as a part of my summer internship at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE), we developed ENMs, assessed geographic distributions and developed conservation values for economically important Rattan palm species of Western Ghats in India. Based on the models generated, we were able to identify five "micro-hotspots" of Rattan diversity, that could potentially help forest management to devise effective conservation strategies. These results were published in the journal Plant Diversity.
The second project, which was part of a year-long Master's thesis work at National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore, I built species distribution models for several range-restricted small mammal species from the Western Himalayas, in order to map their potential suitable habitats. Part of the project also included comparing these to expert-based IUCN range maps.