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Seeing the woods for the trees – when is microclimate important in species distribution models?
Author(s) -
Bennie Jonathan,
Wilson Robert J.,
Maclean Ilya M.D.,
Suggitt Andrew J.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
global change biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.146
H-Index - 255
eISSN - 1365-2486
pISSN - 1354-1013
DOI - 10.1111/gcb.12525
Subject(s) - microclimate , climate change , species distribution , scale (ratio) , grid cell , magnitude (astronomy) , grid , environmental science , climate model , spatial ecology , ecology , computer science , physical geography , mathematics , geography , biology , cartography , habitat , physics , geometry , astronomy
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.