Can Species Distribution Models Predict Colonizations and Extinctions?

Abstract

Aim MaxEnt, a very popular species distribution modelling technique, has been used extensively to relate species’ geographic distributions to environmental variables and to predict changes in species’ distributions in response to environmental change. Here, we test its predictive ability through time (rather than through space, as is commonly done) by modeling colonizations and extinctions. Location Continental U.S. and southern Canada. Time period 1979-2009 Major taxa studied Twenty-one species of passerine birds. Methods We used MaxEnt to relate species’ geographic distributions to the variation in environmental conditions across North America. We then modelled site-specific colonizations and extinctions between 1979 and 2009 as functions of MaxEnt-estimated previous habitat suitability and inter- annual change in habitat suitability and neighborhood occupancy. We evaluated whether the effects were in the expected direction, we partitioned model’s explained deviance, and we compared colonization and extinction model’s accuracy to MaxEnt’s AUC. Results IV Colonization and extinction probabilities both varied as functions of previous habitat suitability, change in habitat suitability, and neighborhood occupancy, in the expected direction. Change in habitat suitability explained very little deviance compared to other predictors. Neighborhood occupancy accounted for more explained deviance in colonization models than in extinction models. MaxEnt AUC correlates with extinction models’ predictive ability, but not with that of colonization models. Main conclusions MaxEnt appears to sometime capture a real effect of the environment on species’ distributions since a statistical effect of habitat suitability is detected through both time and space. However, change in habitat suitability (which is much smaller through time than through space) is a poor predictor of change in occupancy. Over short time scales, proximity of sites occupied by conspecifics predicts changes in occupancy just as well as MaxEnt. The ability of MaxEnt models to predict spatial variation in occupancy (as measured by AUC) gives little indication of transferability through time. Thus, the predictive value of species distribution models may be overestimated when evaluated through space only. Future prediction of species’ responses to climate change should make a distinction between colonization and extinction, recognizing that the two processes are not equally well predicted by SDMs.