Owing to our recent interest in different approaches to modelling extinction risk, and because climate change impacts on biodiversity and conservation is always one of our key interests, we discussed a paper by Barbet-Massin et al. (2010). The authors state that considering the full range of a species is essential for modelling future climatic suitability within a region of interest. For evidence, they provide a comparison of using species occurrence data only within Europe versus considering the full Western Palearctic region. The loss of climatic suitability is decreased when the input data for modelling consists of a larger area. The authors show that extending the geographical space also tends to extend the environmental space which is suitable for the species according to the input data, which makes it more likely for a species to maintain suitable climate space in the course of climate change. Continue reading →