摘要：Climate change presents unprecedented challenges for biological conservation. Agenciesare increasingly looking to modeled projections of species' distributions under future climates to informmanagement strategies. As government scientists with a responsibility to communicate the best availablescience to our policy colleagues, we question whether current modeling approaches and outputs arepractically useful. Here, we synthesize conceptual problems with species distribution models (SDMs)associated with interspecific interactions, dispersal, ecological equilibria and time lags, evolution, and thesampling of niche space. Although projected SDMs have undoubtedly been critical in alerting us to themagnitude of climate change impacts, we conclude that until they offer insights that are more precise thanwhat we can derive from basic ecological theory, we question their utility in deciding how to allocate scarcefunds to large-scale conservation projects
关键词：climate policy; climatic envelope; decision support; distribution modeling; niche; spatial;modeling; species interaction
