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Understanding spatial patterns of species diversity and the distributions of individual species is a consuming problem in biogeography and conservation. The Cape Floristic Region (CFR) of South Africa is a global hotspot of diversity and endemism, and the Protea Atlas Project, with some 60,000 site records across the region, provides an extraordinarily rich data set to analyze biodiversity patterns. Analysis for the region is developed at the spatial scale of one minute grid-cells (~37,000$ cells total for the region). We report on results for 40 species of a flowering plant family Proteaceae (of about 330 in the CFR) for a defined subregion.

Using a Bayesian framework, we develop a two stage, spatially explicit, hierarchical logistic regression. Stage one models the suitability or potential presence for each species at each cell, given species attributes along with …