Incorporating microclimate into species distribution models

By Jonas J. Lembrechts, I. Nijs, Jonathan Lenoir. Ecography, 2018

319 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Species distribution models (SDMs) have rapidly evolved into one of the most widely used tools to answer a broad range of ecological questions, from the effects of climate change to challenges for species management. Current SDMs and their predictions under anthropogenic climate change are, however, often based on free‐air or synoptic temperature conditions with a coarse resolution, and thus fail to capture apparent temperature (cf. microclimate) experienced by living organisms within their habitats. Yet microclimate operates as soon as a habitat can be characterized by a vertical component (e.g. forests, mountains, or cities) or by horizontal variation in surface cover. The mismatch between how we usually express climate (cf. coarse‐grained free‐air conditions) and the apparent microclimatic conditions that living organisms experience has only recently been acknowledged in SDMs, yet several studies have already made considerable progress in tackling this problem from different angles. In this review, we summarize the currently available methods to obtain meaningful microclimatic data for use in distribution modelling. We discuss the issue of extent and resolution, and propose an integrated framework using a selection of appropriately‐placed sensors in combination with both the detailed measurements of the habitat 3D structure, for example derived from digital elevation models or airborne laser scanning, and the long‐term records of free‐air conditions from weather stations. As such, we can obtain microclimatic data with a relevant spatiotemporal resolution and extent to dynamically model current and future species distributions.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/648e5e9f7fc44575fb44fc94aab5ec3f81748b2e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

In Ecology

In Environmental Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Comparative analysis of diversity and environmental niches of soil bacterial, archaeal, fungal and protist communities reveal niche divergences along environmental gradients in the Alps (2021, background): “turing these communities were missing from the models, such as soil microclimate (Lembrechts et al., 2019).”
Forest microclimates and climate change: Importance, drivers and future research agenda (2021, background): “Thus, incorporating microclimates into species distribution models is expected to significantly improve the accuracy of predictions (Slavich et al. 2014; Lembrechts et al. 2019; Zellweger et al. 2019b).”
Insect responses to global change offer signposts for biodiversity and conservation (2020, background): “, 2016) and can increasingly be combined for study systems throughout the world with models of the microclimates experienced by individual insects (Lembrechts et al., 2019; Kearney et al., 2020; Maclean, 2020).”