Species distribution models have limited spatial transferability for invasive species

Abstract

The reliability of transferring species distribution models (SDMs) to new ranges and future climates has been widely debated. Biological invasions offer the unique opportunity to evaluate model transferability, as distribution data between species' native and introduced ranges are geographically independent of each other. Here, we performed the first global quantitative synthesis of the spatial transferability of SDMs for 235 invasive species and assessed the association of model transferability with the focal invader, model choice and parameterisation. We found that SDMs had limited spatial transferability overall. However, model transferability was higher for terrestrial endotherms, species introduced from or to the Southern Hemisphere, and species introduced more recently. Model transferability was also positively associated with the number of presences for model calibration and evaluation, respectively, but negatively with the number of predictors. These findings highlight the importance of considering the characteristics of the focal invader, environment and modelling in the application and assessment of SDMs.

Climatic‐niche evolution with key morphological innovations across clades within Scutiger boulengeri (Anura: Megophryidae)

“…Our results agree with previous progressive uplifts of Tibet (Mulch & Chamberlain, 2006) based approach is sensitive to niche divergence, while ENMs are more inclined to niche conservatism in bidirections. We analyze reasons leading to these differences further and find the native-range model, such as ENMs, for species native to more than one area show much lower range shift, indicating a certain difficulty to predict the distribution of widespread species or clades (Liu et al, 2020b). Strubbe et al (2013) showed that the predictive performance of native range increasing niche change.…”

Global distribution and diversity of alien Ponto-Caspian amphipods

“…Nevertheless, climatically suitable areas that may support such populations can be identified on the basis of modeling. Our high resolution distribution data will be invaluable for modeling future distributions and predicting future invasion pathways of APCAs (Mainali et al 2015; but see Liu et al 2020). This is especially critical under future climate warming scenarios (Zhang et al 2020).…”

Assessing the accuracy of density‐independent demographic models for predicting species ranges

“…One particularly important application of density‐independent DDMs is invasive species risk mapping (Merow et al 2017), an application where traditional SDM approaches have been criticized (Liu et al 2020). Our work confirms that this is potentially an appropriate use of DDMs because invasive species, at the start of an invasion, are typically well below carrying capacity (Ramula et al 2008, Davis 2009, Burns et al 2013).…”