20 Species distribution models (SDMs) offer an effective tool for identifying species 21 conservation requirements and forecasting how global environmental changes will affect 22 species diversity and distribution. This approach is particularly relevant for bats because their 23 nocturnal behaviour hinders detectability and identification in flight. Despite their important 24 contribution to gl...

Many temperate species experienced demographic and range contractions in response to climatic changes during Pleistocene glaciations. In this study, we investigate the evolutionary history of the Tyrrhenian tree frog Hyla sarda, a species inhabiting the Corsica-Sardinia island system (Western Mediterranean basin). We used sequence analysis of two mitochondrial (overall 1229 bp) and three nuclea...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Distribution shifts and natural selection during past climatic changes are important factors in determining the genetic structure of forest species. In particular, climatic fluctuations during the Quaternary appear to have caused changes in the distribution ranges of plants, and thus strongly affected their genetic structure. This study was undertaken to identify the respons...

Predicting contemporary and future species distributions is relevant for science decision making, yet the development of high-resolution spatial predictions numerous taxonomic groups regions limited by scalability available modelling tools. Uniting distribution (SDM) techniques into one high-performance computing (HPC) pipeline, we developed N-SDM, an SDM platform aimed at delivering reproducib...

Species distribution models (SDMs) assume equilibrium between species' distribution and the environment. However, this assumption can be violated under restricted dispersal and spatially autocorrelated environmental conditions. Here we used a model to simulate species' ranges expansion under two non-equilibrium scenarios, evaluating the performance of SDM coupled with spatial eigenvector mappin...

Three independent but complementary lines of research have provided evidence for the recognition of refugia: paleontology, phylogeography and species distributional modelling (SDM). SDM assesses the ecological requirements of a species based on its known occurrences and enables its distribution to be projected on past climatological reconstructions. One advantage over the other two approaches i...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are an effective way of predicting the potential distribution of species and their response to environmental change. Most SDMs apply presence data to a relatively generic set of predictive variables such as climate. However, this weakens the modelling process by overlooking the responses to more cryptic predictive variables. In this paper we demonstrate a mean...

Motivated by the need to solve ecological problems (climate change, habitat fragmentation and biological invasions), there has been increasing interest in species distribution models (SDMs). Predictions from these models inform conservation policy, invasive species management and disease-control measures. However, predictions are subject to uncertainty, the degree and source of which is often u...