Integrated species distribution models to account for sampling biases and improve range wide occurrence predictions

Aim
Species distribution models (SDMs) that integrate presence-only and presence-absence data offer a promising avenue to improve information on species’ geographic distributions. The use of such ‘integrated SDMs’ on a species range-wide extent has been constrained by the often-limited presence-absence data and by the heterogeneous sampling of the presence-only data. Here, we evaluate integrated SDMs for studying species ranges with a novel expert range map-based evaluation. We build a new understanding about how integrated SDMs address issues of estimation accuracy and data deficiency and thereby offer advantages over traditional SDMs.
Location
South and Central America.
Time period
1979-2017.
Major taxa studied
Hummingbirds.
Methods
We build integrated SDMs by linking two observation models – one for each data type – to the same underlying spatial process. We validate SDMs with two schemes: i) cross-validation with presence-absence data and ii) comparison with respect to the species’ ..., A detailed methodology associated with the environmental variables and species data can be found from the references used in the original publication., , This data set is a collection of publicly available species and environmental data. They have been used to study populations and distributions of species and their associations with environment. To avoid risks on species populations, coordinates of the presence records for three species with near-threatened IUCN status and all checklist coordinates have been rounded to 0.01 degrees. The species are Little Woodstar (Chaetocercus bombus), Black-thighed Puffleg (Eriocnemis derbyi) and Hoary Puffleg (Haplophaedia lugens).

## Description of the data and file structure

* File 1 Name: Cloud_cover/MODCF_intraannualSD_resampled_masked_NA30x30_americas.tif
* File 1 Description: Intra-annual variability of cloud cover in 1 square kilometer resolution over the study area.
* Folder 2 Name: Domains_new/
* Folder 2 Description: Folder contains geotif-file for each species showing the study domain, which is a buffer around species expert range map and points records.
* File 3 Name: ...