Data from: Hindcast-validated species distribution models reveal future vulnerabilities of mangroves and salt marsh species

Rapid climate change threatens biodiversity via habitat loss, range
shifts, increases in invasive species, novel species interactions, and
other unforeseen changes. Coastal and estuarine species are especially
vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to sea level rise and may
be severely impacted in the next several decades. Species distribution
modeling can project the potential future distributions of species under
scenarios of climate change using bioclimatic data and georeferenced
occurrence data. However, models projecting suitable habitat into the
future are impossible to ground truth. One solution is to develop species
distribution models for the present and project them to periods in the
recent past where distributions are known to test model performance before
making projections into the future. Here, we develop models using abiotic
environmental variables to quantify the current suitable habitat available
to eight Neotropical coastal species: four mangrove species and four salt
marsh species. Using a novel model validation approach that leverages
newly available monthly climatic data from 1960-2018, we project these
niche models into two time periods in the recent past (i.e., within the
past half-century) when either mangrove or salt marsh dominance was
documented via other data sources. Models were hindcast-validated and then
used to project the suitable habitat of all species at four time periods
in the future under a model of climate change. For all future time
periods, the projected suitable habitat of mangrove species decreased, and
suitable habitat declined more severely in salt marsh species.