The importance of biotic interactions for modelling species distributions under climate change

ABSTRACT Aim There is a debate as to whether biotic interactions exert a dominant role in governing species distributions at macroecological scales. The prevailing idea is that climate is the key limiting factor; thus models that use present‐day climate–species range relationships are expected to provide reasonable means to quantify the impacts of climate change on species distributions. However, there is little empirical evidence that biotic interactions would not constrain species distributions at macroecological scales. We examine this idea, for the first time, and provide tests for two null hypotheses: ( H 0 1) – biotic interactions do not exert a significant role in explaining current distributions of a…