Hi everyone,
I'm trying to add latitude as a variable in my marine mammal modelling approach and I have a doubt. Someone has included this variable? could explain me if your include as categorical or continuos variable ? are you make some of particular transformation?
Thanks in advance guys!!
Ricardo
Latitude is not ordinal and is therefore a continuous variable.
You can covert latitude to decimal: Decimal Degrees = Degrees + minutes/60 + seconds/3600. This is useful when using the Haversine formula to calculate the great circle distance between two points on the Earth.
In addition to previous answer, it can be summarized into latitudinal bands (which is used often in the literature -- e.g., for highly migratory taxa) and then could be categorical. I've seen this used often in bird studies but also see marine mammal example below.
Article Current and Future Patterns of Global Marine Mammal Biodiversity
Hi Ricardo,
I used latitude and longitude many times in SDMs. I usually expressed these variables in the UTM coordinate system (meters) and thus, as continuous variables. In any case, I suggest you to scale latitude (as well as all the other variable included in the model), centering its values by the mean and dividing by the standard deviation, in order to obtain reliable and comparable regression coefficients. You can easily do it by the command “scale” in R.
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