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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.19

Search Space Reduction Using Species Distribution Modeling with Simulated Pollen Signatures

Authors: Haoyu Wang, Jennifer A. Miller, and Shalene Jha

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 346, 13th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025)

Abstract

Microscopic trace materials, such as pollen, are an important category of forensic evidence recovered during investigations. As an environmentally ubiquitous substance that can attach to various surfaces, pollen enables the linking of objects and people in space and time. In this study, we assessed the extent to which the search space could be reduced using simulated pollen signatures. These signatures were compiled by randomly selecting pairs of geographic coordinates on the Earth’s terrestrial land and querying the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) database to identify plant taxa within 50 meters of the coordinates. These taxa were then treated as the parent taxa of the pollen, simulating the hypothetical attachment of pollen signatures to objects or individuals. For each identified pollen taxon, we modeled habitat suitability for the parent plant taxa and combined the spatial distributions to refine the geolocation search area. Since the actual coordinates for these locations of interest were known, we were able to evaluate the global performance of the search space reduction under the assumption of an extreme constraint that no other contextual information was available.

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Haoyu Wang, Jennifer A. Miller, and Shalene Jha. Search Space Reduction Using Species Distribution Modeling with Simulated Pollen Signatures. In 13th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 346, pp. 19:1-19:6, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{wang_et_al:LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.19,
  author =	{Wang, Haoyu and Miller, Jennifer A. and Jha, Shalene},
  title =	{{Search Space Reduction Using Species Distribution Modeling with Simulated Pollen Signatures}},
  booktitle =	{13th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025)},
  pages =	{19:1--19:6},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-378-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{346},
  editor =	{Sila-Nowicka, Katarzyna and Moore, Antoni and O'Sullivan, David and Adams, Benjamin and Gahegan, Mark},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.19},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-238485},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.19},
  annote =	{Keywords: geoforensics, species distribution modeling, search space reduction}
}

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Search Space Reduction Using Species Distribution Modeling with Simulated Pollen Signatures

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