Workshop summary: The application of species distribution models in the megadiverse Neotropics poses a renewed set of research questions

Abstract

ISSN 1948-6596 news and update workshop summary The application of species distribution models in the megadi- verse Neotropics poses a renewed set of research questions Species distribution models: applications, challenges and perspectives – Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 29 th –30 th August 2011 The community of researchers and technicians interested in biogeography is large and growing in Brazil, with members coming from fields as di- verse as ecology, evolution and conservation. The increment in the number of postgraduate pro- grams in ecology and evolutionary biology is linked to many research questions about the causes and dynamics of species’ ranges, as well as about their consequences for short-term evolu- tionary processes. As a result, the use (and abuse) of species distribution models (SDMs) as a tool in research and technical studies has grown rapidly in recent years. Systems that integrate biodiver- sity databases (e.g. SpeciesLink 1 ) allow one to ob- tain distributional information about many spe- cies; and easy-to-use SDM software (e.g. MaxEnt 2 , Phillips et al. 2004, or openModeller 3 , Munoz et al. 2011) is also available online. The easy avail- ability of data and SDM tools provides a powerful means for answering questions about the geo- graphic distribution of species. Potential users include non-specialist researchers, untrained post- graduate students and government technicians. But is this helping to develop a sound and solidly grounded knowledge of the distribution of Neotropical diversity? In order to unite the Brazilian community of SDM users and provide them with a better under- standing of the technique, the Postgraduate Course on Plant Biology of the Universidade Fed- eral de Minas Gerais organized a workshop in Belo Horizonte last August. This workshop allowed more than 100 students and technicians to meet and discuss with researchers working with SDMs. The main conclusions of the meeting were that there is a growing interest in using the technique to study species’ distributions and find unknown populations of rare species, and that there is a need for a code of good practice in both field sur- veys and SDM applications. These conclusions have been already discussed elsewhere (Kamino et al. 2011). Here we develop further one of the problems identified during the workshop: the lack of clear questions in many studies using SDMs; in other words, the mere application of species dis- tribution modelling as a fashionable technique often ‘justifies’ a study. Reviews summarizing the most important challenges for SDMs (e.g. Araujo and Guisan 2006, Zimmermann et al. 2010, Peterson et al. 2011) typically present how users view the field and what problems they perceive in each step in the modelling process. However, things move fast in this emerging field of research because, while the number of studies using SDMs increases steadily (see Fig. 1 in Lobo et al. 2010), the technique is also used to address completely new questions. Thus, the challenges to their application are them- selves changing. We believe that the most impor- tant of these challenges are theoretically rather than methodologically grounded, although we recognize that both kinds of problems overlap to some extent. Here we outline the basic questions that we believe SDM users must take into account while studying current species’ distributions. Soberon (2007) provides perhaps the best starting point to understand the theoretical prob- lems of SDMs (see also Colwell and Rangel 2009; Soberon 2010). The first problem is the definition of a clear research question. Here it is important to discriminate between theoretical questions such as “Why is this species here?” – which are more interesting in the long run – from those that are eminently practical such as “Where is this spe‐ cies?” – which unfortunately seem to be the most common. But even practical questions stimulated 1 http://www.splink.org.br; last accessed 10/11/2011 2 http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~schapire/maxent/; last accessed 10/11/2011 3 http://openmodeller.sourceforge.net/; last accessed 10/11/2011 frontiers of biogeography 4.1, 2012 — © 2012 the authors; journal compilation © 2012 The International Biogeography Society