The importance of land-use legacies for modeling present-day species distributions
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
The importance of land-use legacies for modeling presentday species distributions Xin Chen
. Laura Leites
Received: 1 April 2020 / Accepted: 14 September 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Context Land-use legacies play an important role in shaping contemporary species distributions. However, land-use legacies are rarely considered in species distribution models (SDMs) that aim to model presentday species distributions across the landscape, even though they can lead to a species absence in suitable areas. SDMs that do not account for landuse legacies will likely result in biased predictions of species distributions. Objective We examine the importance of land-use legacies for modeling present-day distributions of tree species at a regional scale, assessing how the addition of land-use legacy variables improves predictive power of SDMs. Methods We generated land-use legacy variables using raster layers of reconstructed historical agricultural land use and 3310 inventory plots. SDMs were developed for six forest tree species based on climatic, edaphic, and topographic variables, and with
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-020-01119-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. X. Chen (&) L. Leites Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, The Pennsylvania State University, 222 Forest Resources Building, University Park, State College, PA 16802, USA e-mail: [email protected]
(SDMLU) and without (SDMBase) land-use legacy variables. We compared the predictive power between SDMLU and SDMBase models and then quantified the local importance of land-use legacy variables relative to other abiotic variables. Results Our results show that the importance of landuse legacy variables for present-day species distributions and the improvement on the predictive power of SDMs is species-specific. The inclusion of land-use legacy variables improved SDMs primarily by lowering errors of commission and increasing the overall accuracy of prediction. Conclusion The influence of land-use legacies on SDMs suggests that, for some tree species, incorporating land-use legacies can accurately identify suitable areas that are not occupied by the species due to land-use legacies, and advance our understanding of their present-day distributions. Keywords Species distribution models Land-use legacies Eastern deciduous forest Earlysuccessional species Mid-successional species Latesuccessional species Balanced random forests
Introduction Species distribution models (SDMs) that link species occurrence or abundance with abiotic factors such as
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Landscape Ecol
climate, topography, and soil properties have been developed to map species distributions and assess potential range shifts under a changing climate (Guisan and Thuiller 2005; Rehfeldt et al. 2006; Iverson et al. 2008; Lavergne et al. 2010; Zimmermann et al. 2010). Although numerous studies have relate
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