The performance of models relating species geographical distributions to climate is independent of trophic level

By Brian Huntley, R. Green, Yvonne C. Collingham, Jane K. Hill, S. G. Willis, Patrick J. Bartlein, W. Cramer, W. Hagemeijer, Christopher M Thomas. 2004

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Species–climate ‘envelope’ models are widely used to evaluate potential climate change impacts upon species and biodiversity. Previous studies have used a variety of methods to fit models making it difficult to assess relative model performance for different taxonomic groups, life forms or trophic levels. Here we use the same climatic data and modelling approach for 306 European species representing three major taxa (higher plants, insects and birds), and including species of different life form and from four trophic levels. Goodness-of-fit measures showed that useful models were fitted for >96% of species, and that model performance was related neither to major taxonomic group nor to trophic level. These results confirm that such climate envelope models provide the best approach currently available for evaluating reliably the potential impacts of future climate change upon biodiversity.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b439c1bd0a43e169bda00d36ffb94b90b330e57e

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Citations in the corpus

Species traits are associated with the quality of bioclimatic models (2008, result): “This is also in accordance with the observations of Huntley et al. (2004) and McPherson and Jetz (2007), who showed that there were generally no differences in modelling performance among higher taxonomic categories or different trophic levels.”
Climate change effects on plant disease: genomes to ecosystems. (2006, background): “Since then, modelers have developed approaches for scaling from the coarse GCM predictions down to the smaller scales at which plant disease epidemics are more typically studied (14, 129, 130) and for scaling up from small-scale predictions (5, 33, 68, 79, 105).”
The View from the Cape: Extinction Risk, Protected Areas, and Climate Change (2005, background): “Region Taxa Number of species Reference Europe Plants 192 Bakkenes et al. 2002 Europe Plants 1200 Araujo et al. 2004 Europe Birds 306 Huntley et al. 2004 Britain and Ireland Plants 54 Berry et al. 2002 South Africa Vertebrates, insects 50 Erasmus et al. 2002 South Africa Plants (Proteaceae) 330…”
Species-specific traits associated to prediction errors in bird habitat suitability modelling (2005, background): “Ozesmi, 1999; Dedecker et al., 2004) and distance-based models such as ecological niche factor analysis (ENFA) and climatic envelopes (e.g., Hirzel et al., 2002; Pearson and Dawson, 2003; Huntley et al., 2004; Remm, 2004).”
Assessing the accuracy of species distribution models: prevalence, kappa and the true skill statistic (TSS) (2006, methodology): “Several recent studies have jointly used AUC as a thresholdindependent and kappa as a threshold-dependent measure of predictive accuracy (Thuiller 2003; Huntley et al. 2004; Pearson, Dawson & Liu 2004; Araujo et al. 2005; Pearson et al. 2006).”
Deadly combination of genes and drought: increased mortality of herbivore‐resistant trees in a foundation species (2009, background): “Even as evidence mounts that genetic variation may play an important role in studies of climate change, many recent models that predict large scale responses to climate have not included the potential influence of intraspecific genetic variation (Parmesan & Yohe, 2003; Huntley et al., 2004; Pounds &”
Climatic Risk Atlas of European Butterflies (2008, background): “Species of higher trophic levels are expected to be modelled least well, since they strongly depend on other species (Huntley et al. 2004).”
Soil nutritional factors improve models of plant species distribution: an illustration with Acer campestre (L.) in France (2006, background): “Contrary to the findings of Huntley et al. (2004), this study shows that the influence of numerous climatic factors on the distribution of A. campestre in France is weaker than the influence of soil pH.”
Determinants of the biogeographical distribution of butterflies in boreal regions (2006, background): “modelling techniques that correlate current species distributions with climatic variables (Sætersdal et al., 1998; Bakkenes et al., 2002; Beaumont & Hughes, 2002; Berry et al., 2002; Pearson & Dawson, 2003; Thuiller, 2003; Huntley et al., 2004).”
Modeling Impacts of Climate Change on Giant Panda Habitat (2012, background): “Though climate envelope models are widely used in climate change research to predict future species distributions [26, 27], there are limitations.”
Cod and climate in a latitudinal cline: physiological analyses of climate effects in marine fishes (2008, background): “Here, climate effects on biogeography and biodiversity are independent of the position of the species in the food chain (Huntley et al. 2004), indicating constraints at the level of the individual species and organisms.”
Ecosystem effects of ocean acidification in times of ocean warming: a physiologist’s view (2008, background): “The respective ‘climate envelope models’ were successfully applied in the terrestrial realm and are currently considered to be the best approach in determining the effects of climate change on biodiversity (Huntley et al. 2004).”
Predicting climate‐induced range shifts: model differences and model reliability (2006, methodology): “However, many models are evaluated with the same data used in model building (e.g. Huntley et al., 2004).”
Vulnerability of African mammals to anthropogenic climate change under conservative land transformation assumptions (2006, background): “However, it is the most reliable data available for mobile organisms, and GAM models have been shown to exhibit a relatively good performance even for highly mobile taxa (Brotons et al., 2004; Huntley et al., 2004; Araújo et al., 2005a).”
Explaining and predicting the success of invading species at different stages of invasion (2006, background): “(2002) and not uncommon in Jalas and Suominen (1976). It follows at once that the same climatic envelope will not fit both the native range and the combined native and introduced range.”