Burrowing into the past: Extending niche space models of procellariiform breeding grounds by merging fossil and historic data

Aim
Predicting species’ potential distributions and niches requires multi-scale data encompassing the past and present. Increasingly, researchers have advocated using historical context to inform ecological niche models (ENMs). Two key sources of past distributions are fossils and historical records. Fossils are subject to sampling and taphonomy biases but offer insights into temporal dynamics over millennia. Historical records are filtered by human perceptions over a shorter temporal window, but compared to fossils, they provide different contextual information from a potentially broader range of habitats. New Zealand (NZ) has a relatively short history of human occupation, with rich fossil and historical literature archives. Approximately 25% of the world’s seabirds breed in NZ, nearly half of which are burrowing procellariiforms. Since human arrival in NZ, most procellariiforms have declined in abundance and breeding ranges, primarily due to introduced mammalian predators. We combine..., , , # Burrowing into the past: Extending niche space models of procellariiform breeding grounds by merging fossil and historic data

The attached project recreates the analyses conducted in the seabird paleoENM manuscript ([https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.70032](https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.70032)).

## Description of the data and file structure

The ./scripts/ directory contains all the necessary analysis scripts, all of which have detailed comments describing their use. The seabird_sdm.R script calls each of the *_data.R scripts, and contains the primary analysis for our manuscript. The class_trait_analysis.R script conducts the trait group analysis and produces the associated figures in our supplementary materials. All scripts have detailed headers describing their use and purpose.

The environmental predictor layers used in this analysis were sourced from NZEnvDS, who explicitly request that these files be shared, but are freely available for download from their site. In addition, a potentia...,