Opening the climate envelope reveals no macroscale associations with climate in European birds

Abstract

Predicting how species distributions might shift as global climate changes is fundamental to the successful adaptation of conservation policy. An increasing number of studies have responded to this challenge by using climate envelopes, modeling the association between climate variables and species distributions. However, it is difficult to quantify how well species actually match climate. Here, we use null models to show that species-climate associations found by climate envelope methods are no better than chance for 68 of 100 European bird species. In line with predictions, we demonstrate that the species with distribution limits determined by climate have more northerly ranges. We conclude that scientific studies and climate change adaptation policies based on the indiscriminate use of climate envelope methods irrespective of species sensitivity to climate may be misleading and in need of revision.

Fig. 1.

Output from the null distribution algorithm. (A) Real distribution (Serinus serinus) with presence indicated in black, absence in gray. (B and C) Two realizations of the null distribution. (D) Semivariograms of the real distribution (black) and 99 simulations (thin gray): note that the real distribution falls entirely within the null distributions.

Fig. 2.

Histograms of ranked climate envelope AUC scores of 100 distribution patterns among 99 null models. (A) 100 real species distributions. (B) 100 semideterministic patterns used in the power analysis. Black bar indicates the number of species for which the AUC score for the distribution of interest was in the top 5% of randomizations: 32 species for real species, 72 for the power analysis.

Fig. 3.

Boxplot of the mean latitudes of the ranges of species that were poorly or well fit by climate envelopes. The median is indicated by the black line and first and interquartile range by the box. Whiskers cover the full range of the data.