Toward reliable habitat suitability and accessibility models in an era of multiple environmental stressors

Abstract

Global biodiversity declines, largely driven by climate and land‐use changes, urge the development of transparent guidelines for effective conservation strategies. Species distribution modeling (SDM) is a widely used approach for predicting potential shifts in species distributions, which can in turn support ecological conservation where environmental change is expected to impact population and community dynamics. Improvements in SDM accuracy through incorporating intra‐ and interspecific processes have boosted the SDM field forward, but simultaneously urge harmonizing the vast array of SDM approaches into an overarching, widely adoptable, and scientifically justified SDM framework. In this review, we first discuss how climate warming and land‐use change interact to govern population dynamics and species’ distributions, depending on species’ dispersal and evolutionary abilities. We particularly emphasize that both land‐use and climate change can reduce the accessibility to suitable habitat for many species, rendering the ability of species to colonize new habitat and to exchange genetic variation a crucial yet poorly implemented component of SDM. We then unite existing methodological SDM practices that aim to increase model accuracy through accounting for multiple global change stressors, dispersal, or evolution, while shifting our focus to model feasibility. We finally propose a roadmap harmonizing model accuracy and feasibility, applicable to both common and rare species, particularly those with poor dispersal abilities. This roadmap (a) paves the way for an overarching SDM framework allowing comparison and synthesis of different SDM studies and (b) could advance SDM to a level that allows systematic integration of SDM outcomes into effective conservation plans.

Rapid Evolution of Invasive Weeds Under Climate Change: Present Evidence and Future Research Needs

“…This presents a clear challenge to developing proactive management systems; as well as the need to understand and monitor the formation of novel invasive weed ecotypes, there is the need to manage ecosystems for greater resistance to invasion. Climate modeling approaches for invasive plants to this point have largely relied on large-scale geographic inputs (e.g., regional, national or international scales), but ecosystem resistance tends to act at local levels, and thus there is a need to research the potential for finer-scale modeling (Bradley, 2016;De Kort et al, 2020). Weed researchers conducting a horizon scan of weed research priorities identified the underlying challenges largely related to combining agroecological, socio-economic and technological approaches (Neve et al, 2018).…”

Neither historical climate nor contemporary range fully explain the extant patterns of molecular diversity in marine species

“…Additionally, processes shaping extant molecular diversity of temperate marine species have predominantly been investigated in the Northern Hemisphere, where glaciation events and variation in ice sheets differ profoundly from Southern Hemisphere coastal systems (Velichko et al, 1997), many of which did not have ice cover at the height of the most recent glaciation. Lastly, drivers of molecular diversity are also usually investigated either visually with habitat suitability maps (Assis et al, 2014; Chefaoui et al, 2017; Neiva et al, 2014) or statistically with linear models (Acevedo‐Limón et al, 2020; De Kort et al, 2020; Manel et al, 2020), but rarely with both approaches. The prevailing processes driving intraspecific diversity can be inferred with more certainty when both visual and statistical analyses are combined (Yannic et al, 2014).…”

“…Different drivers of molecular diversity can be expected in marine than terrestrial species, as global trends of intraspecific diversity differ between the two, with marine taxa showing strong latitudinal trends (Manel et al, 2020), whereas terrestrial taxa do not (De Kort et al, 2020). Many inferences of molecular diversity are also often obtained from a single marker, which has its owns caveats, as markers like mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) are expected to reflect more historical processes compared with other markers such as genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs; Wang, 2011).…”

“…Although recent work formally testing both hypotheses suggests that contemporary range position may be a better predictor of genetic diversity than historical climatic stability (De Kort et al, 2020; Gougherty et al, 2020), these studies were conducted in terrestrial settings, leaving comprehensive comparisons in marine species unexplored. Different drivers of molecular diversity can be expected in marine than terrestrial species, as global trends of intraspecific diversity differ between the two, with marine taxa showing strong latitudinal trends (Manel et al, 2020), whereas terrestrial taxa do not (De Kort et al, 2020). Many inferences of molecular diversity are also often obtained from a single marker, which has its owns caveats, as markers like mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) are expected to reflect more historical processes compared with other markers such as genome‐wide single‐nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs; Wang, 2011).…”

Multi‐decadal land use impacts across the vast range of an iconic threatened species

“…Our modelling approach combined multi-temporal occurrence records with year-specific land use/cover data to assess range change and potential drivers of distribution. There is a growing realization of the important role that land cover data plays within species distribution modelling (Chauvier et al, 2021;Kort et al, 2020), especially at different temporal and spatial scales as a proxy for key processes of ecosystem functioning controlling species distribution and abundance patterns (Arenas-Castro et al, 2019). However, incorporating time series of land cover data has followed different approaches, for example, by calculating seasonal variation in land cover (or vegetation indices) at occurrence points (e.g.…”