Geospatial modeling is one of the most powerful tools available to conservation biologists for estimating current species ranges of Earth's biodiversity. Now, with the advantage of predictive climate models, these methods can be deployed for understanding future impacts on threatened biota. Here, we employ predictive modeling under a conservative estimate of future climate change to examine imp...

Species Distribution Models (SDMs) have been reported as a useful tool for the risk assessment and modeling of the pathways of dispersal of freshwater invasive alien species (IAS). Environmental DNA (eDNA) is a novel tool that can help detect IAS at their early stage of introduction and additionally improve the data available for a more efficient management. SDMs rely on presence and absence of...

Physiological tolerance of environmental conditions can influence species-level responses to climate change. Here, we used species-specific thermal tolerances to predict the community responses of ant species to experimental forest-floor warming at the northern and southern boundaries of temperate hardwood forests in eastern North America. We then compared the predictive ability of thermal tole...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are key tools in biodiversity and conservation, but assessing their reliability unsampled locations is difficult, especially where there sampling biases. We present a spatially-explicit sensitivity analysis for SDMs – SDM profiling which assesses the leverage that have on overall model by exploring interaction between effect variable response curves prevalence...

Traditionally, the niche of a species is described as a hypothetical 3D space, constituted by well-known biotic interactions (e.g. predation, competition, trophic relationships, resource-consumer interactions, etc.) and various abiotic environmental factors. Species distribution models (SDMs), also called "niche models" and often used to predict wildlife distribution at landscape scale, are typ...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are used to generate hypotheses regarding the potential distributions of species under different environmental conditions, such as forecasts of species range shifts in response to climate change and predictions of invasive species range expansions. However, an accurate description of species’ geographic ranges as a function of the environment requires that spe...

Species distribution modeling (SDM) is an essential method in ecology and conservation. SDMs are often calibrated within one country's borders, typically along a limited environmental gradient with biased and incomplete data, making the quality of these models questionable. In this study, we evaluated how adequate are national presence-only data for calibrating regional SDMs. We trained SDMs fo...

Species distribution models (SDMs) trained on presence-only data are frequently used in ecological research and conservation planning. However, users of SDM software are faced with a variety of options, and it is not always obvious how selecting one option over another will affect model performance. Working with MaxEnt software and with tree fern presence data from New Zealand, we assessed whet...