Data from: Combining climate, land use change and dispersal to predict the distribution of endangered species with limited vagility

Aim: Many rare species are dispersal-limited and minimal land use and
climate changes can impact their colonization capacity. Most ecological
niche models predict the distribution of species under future climate and
land use change scenarios without incorporating specie-specific dispersal
abilities. Here we investigated the effect of climate and land use change
on low vagile species accounting for their dispersal capacity and defined
accessible areas in the future. Location: Europe. Taxon: Saproxylic
beetles. Methods: We used the current (2007-2012) occurrences of six
endangered saproxylics to develop ecological niche models using current
climate and land use conditions. We projected species distributions under
four future climate and land use change scenarios to estimate their
potential occurrences. Finally, accounting for species-specific dispersal,
we limited their distributions to accessible areas in 2040-50. Results:
Without accounting for dispersal abilities we found a strong and positive
impact of climate change on the distribution of Cerambix cerdo, Cucujus
cinnaberinus, Morimus funereus and Rosalia alpina and a positive effect of
land use change on the distribution of Lucanus cervus and Osmoderma
eremita. When species-specific dispersal was included, we found a strong
and positive impact of land use change on the distribution of all the
species. In this case climate change had a lower but positive effect on
the distribution of C. cerdo, C. cinnaberinus, L. cervus and R. alpina,
and a negative effect on the distribution of O. eremita. Main conclusion:
We found that climate change would promote the expansion of saproxylic
beetles only in the unrealistic case of unlimited dispersal. Accounting
for dispersal abilities, the expansion of our species would be mainly
conditioned by the effect of land use change. Thus, we encourage
researchers to combine climate and land use change with dispersal when
projecting species distribution under future scenarios to accurately
identify areas with fundamental species-specific resources.