:lol: i was going to say something, but you did a much better job. What exactly was your thesis on?
In a very small nut shell, my thesis was looking at the requirements and preferences of animals in order to map their potential distributions. It was being done as an alternative way of species distribution projection/prediction. The way it is usually done is to look at the known distrubution, select environmental parameters arbitrarily and look for correlations - a very cheap but extremely poor way of doing it, in fact, all the normal method does is a poor job of describing the currently known realised niche, and doesn't even begin to describe, let alone explain the fundamental/potential niche (having said that, there are cases where you actually want to describe the currently realised niche rather than determine the fundamental/potential niche, but the most common use of the usual system is to predict species distributions, which is usually a ridiculous way of doing it). The advent of GIS makes the system I was developing possible. It's much, much better, but much, much more expensive. I was mainly looking at temperature as an environmental variable, but I also looked at vegetation, rainfall and several others, and if you take a species of interest you can use the method to work things out. The more complex the animals' needs, the more difficult and expensive the process is. Basically, you test the animal in the lab, work out what its ideal conditions are, what its extremes of tolerance are, and put each trait over the respective GIS layer. What you generally find is that the ideal niche and the realised niche (what the animal would do best in and what it actually experiences in the wild) are extremely different. To give an extreme example, animals living in harsh deserts are adapted to living without much water, because otherwise they couldn't live where they do. When it rains a lot, there's a lot of water, they drink, they grow, they breed, they flourish, they thrive. They have all these extreme adaptations to living in such a horrible environment, but they don't
want that horrible environment, they want the nice environment. So why don't they live in a nice environment? Because they are outcompeted in the nice areas by animals which don't put resources into having adaptations to the extreme environment. There are more subtle things going on in less extreme environments, but the same sort of thing is going on (water availability isn't the only stress animals have). I'd explain more, but this post is long enough for you to read and I don't feel like typing more
Funnily enough, I just spoke to my honours supervisor today for the first time in about a year. The results of my thesis should be published in 2009, which will be pretty cool
More than two years after writing it I still haven't actually read the whole thing through from start to finish
