Shaping the Future: the importance of land use when projecting the future distribution of Endangered Amphibians and Reptiles.

Abstract

Obtaining reliable predictions of future species distributions under global change scenarios is fundamental for identifying priority conservation sites. This requires incorporating the main drivers of distribution shifts into the modeling process. Climate change and land use change are the two primary drivers of species distributions, yet they have been considered differently in studies exploring future scenarios. Most studies focus solely on bioclimatic variables, given that climate is a major determinant of species distributions on a large spatial scale. In our study, we explored the impact of including dynamic land use variables in species distribution models, examining predicted range loss and spatial mismatch of suitable areas compared to models using only bioclimatic variables. Our findings indicate that including land cover can significantly alter model outputs. While incorporating land use and land cover variables did not enhance the predictive power for most species, it substantially affected the predicted future suitable areas for 60% of the species (mean change = 69%, range: 4% to 167%). This trend was consistent across all spatial resolutions. The two modeling approaches also differed in the spatial location of suitable areas. The level of disagreement varied across species but was generally high for both current and future scenarios, increasing with coarser resolutions. Our results underscore the significant implications of excluding land use change variables and highlight the necessity of considering these factors on a taxon-specific basis.