Comparing climatic suitability and niche distances to explain populations responses to extreme climatic events

Habitat suitability calculated from Species Distribution Models (SDMs) has been used to assess population performance, but empirical studies have provided weak or inconclusive support to this approach. Novel approaches measuring population distances to niche centroid and margin in environmental space have been recently proposed to explain population performance, particularly when populations experience exceptional environmental conditions that may place them outside of the species niche. Here, we use data of co-occurring species’ decay, gathered after an extreme drought event occurring in the SE of the Iberian Peninsula which highly affected rich semiarid shrubland communities, to compare the relationship between population decay (mortality and remaining green canopy) and (1) distances between populations’ location and species niche margin and centroid in the environmental space, and (2) climatic suitability estimated from frequently used SDMs (here MaxEnt) considering both the extreme ...