Assessing the accuracy of density-independent demographic models for predicting species ranges

Abstract

Accurately predicting species ranges is a primary goal of ecology. Demographic distribution models (DDMs), which correlate underlying vital rates (e.g. survival and reproduction) with environmental conditions, can potentially predict species ranges through time and space. However, tests of DDM accuracy across wide ranges of species' life histories are surprisingly lacking. Using simulations of 1.5 million hypothetical species' range dynamics, we evaluated when DDMs accurately predicted future ranges, to provide clear guidelines for the use of this emerging approach. We limited our study to deterministic demographic models ignoring density dependence, since these models are the most commonly ..