Reopening the climate envelope reveals macroscale associations with climate in European birds

Beale et al. (1) reported that species–climate associations estimated with envelope models were no better than expected by chance for 68% of the European birds studied. Beale et al. estimated species–climate associations with 4 variables, including soil water availability and ignored ≈11% of the available bird species records for Europe, i.e., all probable and confirmed records with <10 breeding pairs and all possible breeding records. To investigate the consequences of these choices, we replicated their study using the complete set of available bird records for Europe (2). We restricted analysis to climate variables expected to impose direct constraints on bird distributions (3). Our models had higher area under the curve (AUC) values than those of Beale et al. 90% of the time (Fig. 1A). Improved model performance was mainly due to the use of more complete species distributions data (Fig. 1B). Most importantly, measured species–climate associations were better than expected by chance 72% of the time (P < 0.05), …