Refining model estimates of potential species’ distribution to relevant accessible areas
Résumé
Dispersal is an important, yet overlooked phenomenon when studying species’ distributions using ecological
niche models (ENMs). Here, we use species’ dispersal limits to evaluate and refine ENM estimates only to the
areas accessible to the species within the study region and, thereby, enhance the model interpretations. First,
we ran multiple ENMs to estimate the distribution of sea krait species in both marine and terrestrial
environments. Second, we estimated dispersal of the sea kraits using a cost analysis approach. Finally, we
outline a new approach that combines dispersal models and ENMs with the purpose of estimating the
accessible range when projecting species’ distribution estimates outside the known species range. We found
that only a small proportion of the area the ENMs were projected over was accessible to sea kraits. The
majority of the suitable areas for sea kraits are within the accessible area. Outside the accessible area, there is
only a very limited suitable area for sea kraits. Our results suggest that when dispersal is taken into account,
sea kraits seem to occupy most of their suitable available niche and that they may be unable to colonize much
of the area outside of their dispersal ranges. Using dispersal estimates to refine species’ distribution pre-
dictions is a useful tool for refining the area of focus when ENM results are interpreted. Estimating species’
dispersal also helps evaluate the ability of the models to predict the species’ distributions in areas that are not
accessible to the species and, hence, the potential commission error represented by overprediction