Shadow distributions: Deconstructing the geography of human impacts on species' natural distribution

Abstract

It remains unknown how species’ populations across their geographic range are constrained by multiple coincident natural and anthropogenic environmental gradients. Conservation actions are likely undermined without this knowledge because the relative importance of the multiple anthropogenic threats is not set within the context of the natural determinants of species’ distributions. We introduce the novel concept of a species “shadow distribution” to address this knowledge gap, using explainable artificial intelligence to deconstruct the environmental building blocks of species distributions. We assessed shadow distributions for multiple threatened freshwater fishes in Switzerland which indicated how and where species respond negatively to threats ̶ with negative threat impacts covering 87% of locations inside species’ ecological niches. Our findings indicate very widely used threat and biodiversity mapping exercises to be inadequate for the conservation of species geographic distributions. Overall, we show how priority actions for nature’s recovery can be identified and contextualised within the multiple natural constraints on biodiversity to better meet national and international biodiversity targets.