Limitations with data:

The soil preference of the plant was based on the Soil Moisture Regime (SMR) but we were unable to  find a SMR GIS file for BC and had to generalize to soil drainage. We attempted to match the soil drainage data to the SMR, but had to make some assumptions on how the soil drainage data was classified.

Our project assumes that our leafy spurge data contains all the current sites of leafy spurge, which is untrue as not all areas of BC were surveyed. We would have liked to know the size of each area surveyed for our IAPP data and how many plants/size of area each point represented.

There were also a number of variables of interest that we did not include, such as wind, animals, and human disturbances. This was due to uncertainty as to how we should represent these factors.

Limitations of MCE:

When normalizing our land use data, we manually ranked them based on our knowledge from literature findings. There is subjectivity involved and this may alter our results. Agriculture was ranked a 1(most preferred land use) because Leafy Spurge is commonly found along the edge of agricultural areas, but on the other hand, these plants have difficulty invading cultivated areas. Classes ranked from 2-4 were more arbitrary because literature findings only list the most preferred and least preferred areas.

We used a “near” fuzzy membership rather than linear because our plant prefers dry soils (rapid drainage) but current plants were not found in any areas of very rapid drainage. Because we could not attain SMR data in BC, we had to assume the rapidity was on the extreme end (very rapid), and not preferred by our plant.

Our normalization of Soil, Elevation and Aspect were done according to the Ecological Framework for Euphorbia esula found on the E-Flora BC website, but there are some limitations as the data provided was only based on 4 recorded field plots.