Species Distribution and Climate Change

Species distribution modeling uses statistical and computational tools to predict where a given species can survive based on climate, terrain, and other environmental variables — essentially mapping the boundaries of an ecological niche across space and time. As global temperatures shift, these models help researchers anticipate which habitats will become unsuitable, where species might relocate, and which populations face the greatest extinction risk, making the work directly relevant to conservation planning. Methods like MaxEnt have become standard for building these predictions from occurrence records, including data contributed by citizen scientists through platforms that have dramatically expanded geographic and taxonomic coverage. Active challenges include improving how models handle species interactions, rare-event data, and the deep uncertainty involved in projecting ecological responses decades into the future.

Works

1,386,629

Total citations

2,479,995

Keywords

Species Distribution ModelingClimate ChangeEcological NicheMaxEntBiodiversityCitizen Science