UC Santa Cruz

Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are the primary tool used to predict the future niche spaces for species. These models, however, do not usually incorporate species interactions that may restrict available niche space. Analysis of the widely studied coevolving network of Greya moths and Lithophragma plants shows that incorporating species interactions into SDMs can produce results that differ greatly from models without species interaction effects. This effect is highly variable, however, even among very closely related species. Moreover, choosing different phylogenetic levels to run SDMs can alter the predictions greatly, but this effect is also highly variable. The differences among projections that incorporate species interactions and phylogenetics, and those that include neither effect, may result from the relative ranges of these species and populations, and their relationships to each other. We also show here how these models predict changes in the particular combinations of plant and insect species that interact in each region, which could, in turn, lead to yet more cascading effects on the future of the geographic distributions of these coevolving lineages of interacting species.