Abstract
Predicting species distributions requires substantial numbers of georeferenced occurrences and access to remotely sensed climate and land cover data. Reliable estimates of the distribution of most species are unavailable, either because digitized georeferenced distributional data are rare or not digitized. The emergence of online biodiversity information databases and citizen science platforms dramatically improves the amount of information available to establish current and historical distribution of lesser-documented species. We demonstrate how the combination of museum and online citizen science databases can be used to build reliable distribution maps for poorly documented species. To do so, we investigated the distribution and the potential range expansions of two north-eastern North American spider species (Arachnida: Araneae), the Northern black widow (Latrodectus variolus) and the Black purse-web spider (Sphodros niger). Our results provide the first predictions of distribution for these two species. We also found that the Northern black widow has expanded north of its previously known range providing valuable information for public health education. For the Black purse-web spider, we identify potential habitats outside of its currently known range, thus providing a better understanding of the ecology of this poorly-documented species. We demonstrate that increasingly available online biodiversity databases are rapidly expanding biogeography research for conservation, ecology, and in specific cases, epidemiology, of lesser known taxa.
Highlights
Data deficiency is the main obstacle for developing accurate distribution maps [1]
We successfully modeled the current distributions of Latrodectus variolus (Fig 1) and Sphodros niger (Fig 2)
The historical distribution of S. niger was modeled successfully (Fig 2) but we failed to predict the historical distribution for L. variolus which is not included in maps
Summary
Museum specimens, private collections and historical literature are the major. Museums that have digital databases readily available sometimes lack information such as latitude, longitude, and precision of the GPS coordinates, which are necessary for generating species distribution models. Museum specimen data often cover a limited time span [2, 3]. Observations or collections over the last 20 years are rarely found in museums, creating temporal gaps in database coverage. Such temporal gaps must be filled to produce reliable distribution predictions as recent anthropogenic climate and land use change hastens species range shifts [4, 5]
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