Modeled ranges of California plant species and scripts to run the models for Spatial phylogenetics of the native California flora (Thornhill et al. BMC Biology)

The species distribution modeling algorithm Maxent was used to model
the range of each Californian species, using the cleaned
species-level spatial dataset from Baldwin et al.
2017. Models were fit at the species level ; each OTU’s
range was then taken to be the union of the ranges of its
included species. Models were fit using four
predictor variables representing major energy- and
water-related variables known to be important for California
plant distributions: climatic water deficit, annual
precipitation, mean summer maximum temperature (June–August), and
mean winter minimum temperature (December– February) as described
in Thornhill et al. 2017. In addition to the standard Maxent modeling
approach, we also used a second “distance hybrid” approach to
model the area for each species that was both
climatically suitable and geographically close to observed
occurrences. The distance constraint arguably increases realism
by accounting for spatial processes such as
dispersal limitation and metapopulation dynamics.