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The importance of land-use legacies for modeling present-day species distributions

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Abstract

Context

Land-use legacies play an important role in shaping contemporary species distributions. However, land-use legacies are rarely considered in species distribution models (SDMs) that aim to model present-day species distributions across the landscape, even though they can lead to a species absence in suitable areas. SDMs that do not account for land-use legacies will likely result in biased predictions of species distributions.

Objective

We examine the importance of land-use legacies for modeling present-day distributions of tree species at a regional scale, assessing how the addition of land-use legacy variables improves predictive power of SDMs.

Methods

We generated land-use legacy variables using raster layers of reconstructed historical agricultural land use and 3310 inventory plots. SDMs were developed for six forest tree species based on climatic, edaphic, and topographic variables, and with (SDMLU) and without (SDMBase) land-use legacy variables. We compared the predictive power between SDMLU and SDMBase models and then quantified the local importance of land-use legacy variables relative to other abiotic variables.

Results

Our results show that the importance of land-use legacy variables for present-day species distributions and the improvement on the predictive power of SDMs is species-specific. The inclusion of land-use legacy variables improved SDMs primarily by lowering errors of commission and increasing the overall accuracy of prediction.

Conclusion

The influence of land-use legacies on SDMs suggests that, for some tree species, incorporating land-use legacies can accurately identify suitable areas that are not occupied by the species due to land-use legacies, and advance our understanding of their present-day distributions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank R. McCullough from the USDA Forest Service for providing soil and topography values for FIA plots. We also thank D. Diefenbach, E. Hanks, A. Prasad, and E. Smithwick who served in X. Chen’s dissertation committee for helpful comments. L. Leites acknowledges partial funding by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hatch Appropriations under Project #PEN04700 and Accession #1019151.

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  1. Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, The Pennsylvania State University, 222 Forest Resources Building, University Park, State College, PA, 16802, USA

    Xin Chen

  2. Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, The Pennsylvania State University, 312 Forest Resources Building, University Park, State College, PA, 16802, USA

    Laura Leites

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  1. Xin Chen
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Correspondence to Xin Chen.

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Chen, X., Leites, L. The importance of land-use legacies for modeling present-day species distributions. Landscape Ecol 35, 2759–2775 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-020-01119-0

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