Seeing the woods for the trees – when is microclimate important in species distribution models?

Potter et al., (2013) highlight the challenges and provide recommendations for progress in representing microclimate in Species Distribution Models (SDMs), widely used to predict distributions by establishing relationships between climatic variables and species presence. They show that the grid lengths of published SDMs are typically four orders of magnitude larger than the length of animals under study, and three orders of magnitude larger than plants. They conclude that the mismatch between the length scales of climate data and the species themselves is a major barrier for progress, and that the ideal spatial resolution for climate data in SDMs, notwithstanding practical constraints, is between 1 and 10 times the length of the organism.