Due to their complexity, coral reefs are difficult to study especially when considering the role that the interplay between the terrestrial and marine environments has in shaping distribution of marine, terrestrial, and amphibious species. Many organisms live in remote areas of the ocean and inhabit both terrestrial and marine environments. Such amphibious lifestyle poses analytical difficulties due to broad distribution and scale of coral reefs. Ecological niche modeling is a widely used technique that allows to estimate the environmental set of conditions (niche) in which organisms can survive and reproduce. Estimating the distributions of species with complex life histories (i.e., dependent on various natural resources) at broad geographic scales is crucial, as many of these taxa are threatened (i.e., amphibians, aquatic reptiles, birds, and mammals). However, distribution estimates of such species remain challenging; thus, here we propose an approach to account for marine and terrestrial environmental domains to estimate the distribution of amphibious species. We also test whether inclusion of both environments leads to improved estimates of these species’ distributions. First we calibrated ecological niche models for marine and terrestrial domains separately, and subsequently we outlined a method to combine the marine–terrestrial potential distributions by integrating estimates of the two ecological niches into a single predictive model. Our ecological niche models produced inaccurate distribution predictions of species with amphibious life histories when only one of the environments was used in model calibration. When both aquatic and terrestrial environments were included, our models predicted narrower and more accurate potential distributions. Accounting for the dual environments involved in shaping the niches of amphibious species and their distributions is essential for studying the ecology and proposing conservation management actions for the species studied here. Models that take into account only a subset of the environmental factors are prone to overestimating species’ distributions and should be interpreted with caution.

中文翻译：

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用于估计两栖海洋物种潜在分布及其对保护意义的简单框架

由于其复杂性，珊瑚礁很难研究，特别是在考虑到陆地和海洋环境之间的相互作用在塑造海洋、陆地和两栖物种分布方面的作用时。许多生物生活在海洋的偏远地区，同时栖息在陆地和海洋环境中。由于珊瑚礁的广泛分布和规模，这种两栖生活方式给分析带来了困难。生态位建模是一种广泛使用的技术，它允许估计生物体可以生存和繁殖的环境条件集（生态位）。在广泛的地理范围内估计具有复杂生活史（即依赖于各种自然资源）的物种的分布至关重要，因为其中许多类群受到威胁（即两栖动物、水生爬行动物、鸟类、和哺乳动物）。然而，这些物种的分布估计仍然具有挑战性；因此，我们在这里提出了一种考虑海洋和陆地环境域的方法，以估计两栖物种的分布。我们还测试了包含这两种环境是否会导致对这些物种分布的估计得到改进。首先，我们分别校准了海洋和陆地领域的生态位模型，随后我们概述了一种方法，通过将两个生态位的估计整合到一个单一的预测模型中来结合海洋 - 陆地潜力分布。当模型校准中仅使用一种环境时，我们的生态位模型对具有两栖生活史的物种的分布预测不准确。当包括水生和陆地环境时，我们的模型预测了更窄、更准确的潜在分布。考虑形成两栖物种的生态位及其分布所涉及的双重环境对于研究生态学和为这里研究的物种提出保护管理行动至关重要。仅考虑环境因素子集的模型容易高估物种的分布，应谨慎解释。