Information on biotic interactions improves transferability of distribution models

Abstract

Predicting changes in species’ distributions is a crucial problem in ecology, with leading methods assuming that a species’ distribution reflects its climatic requirements.Empirical support for this approach relies on our ability to use observations of a species’ distribution in one region to predict its range in other regions (model transferability). Here,we contradict this inference by showing how competition among different species (biotic interactions) produce model transferability. We show that biotic interactions shape range margins through several previously unrecognized mechanisms, that for some mechanisms, small changes in species’ interactions dramatically shift range margins and that model transferability can arise from a trade off among mechanisms. Our work indicates that information on biotic interactions will improve predictions of species’ range margins when species interactions differ markedly from one region to another, or when range margins are sensitive to small changes in species’ interactions.