An innovative tool for mapping and modelling species distributions: the Biodiversity and Climate Change Virtual Laboratory

Models play a critical role in synthesising our understanding of the natural world and making forward projections into novel conditions. While they are central to ecological forecasting, models remain inaccessible to most ecologists, in large part due to the informatics challenges of managing the flows of information in and out of such models. The Biodiversity and Climate Change Virtual Laboratory (BCCVL) is a “one stop modelling shop” that simplifies the process of biodiversity and climate impact modelling. It uses national computational infrastructure to provide access to global biodiversity, climate and environmental data integrated with a suite of tools in a coherent online environment. In this demo, we will showcase how the BCCVL enables researchers to investigate, explore and accelerate biodiversity and climate change research.