Making better biogeographical predictions of species’ distributions

Summary Biogeographical models of species’ distributions are essential tools for assessing impacts of changing environmental conditions on natural communities and ecosystems. Practitioners need more reliable predictions to integrate into conservation planning (e.g. reserve design and management). Most models still largely ignore or inappropriately take into account important features of species’ distributions, such as spatial autocorrelation, dispersal and migration, biotic and environmental interactions. Whether distributions of natural communities or ecosystems are better modelled by assembling individual species’ predictions in a bottom‐up approach or modelled as collective entities is another important…