Modeling Species and Community Responses to Past, Present, and Future Episodes of Climatic and Ecological Change

Abstract

There is an urgent need to understand species and community responses to climatic and ecological changes to predict biodiversity patterns given anticipated global change. The current distribution of species and the environment provide a limited perspective to study and predict ecological responses; therefore, biodiversity responses to past environmental changes must be examined. The rapid development of ecological niche models (ENMs) and their use in reconstructing past species distributions has facilitated inclusion of past observations into predictive models. Paleodata offer an opportunity to test the predictive ability of ENMs and their underlying assumptions. However, paleodata remain underutilized despite the rapidly growing field of paleoinformatics. New modeling methods that incorporate species associations, coupled with paleodata, provide more robust approaches to studying species and community responses, especially given the predicted emergence of no-analog climates and communities in the future.