OOS 54

The Role of Biotic Interactions in Structuring Species Distributions: Synthesizing Across Ecological Disciplines and Spatial Scales in the Face of Climate Change

Over the last century, ecologists have faced the challenge of understanding the dynamic processes that structure species distributions. Different subfields of ecology have contributed substantially to this task, working at the scale of local communities to entire biogeographic regions. Despite studying relevant and interrelated processes, ecologists struggle to integrate this knowledge across disparate spatial scales and ecological disciplines. In the next 100 years, this synthesis becomes even more urgent given the urgent need to forecast the effects of global climate change on ecological systems. Currently, attempts to tackle this issue rely on a suite of niche models that correlate species’ environmental requirements with their large-scale geographic distributions (e.g. species distribution models, bioclimatic envelope models, habitat suitability models, etc.). However, these correlative models ignore important ecological knowledge about species interactions gained over decades of experiments and observational studies, the results of which show that biotic interactions can structure species distributions and contribute to species coexistence. This problematic deficiency has been noted and widely debated for the past decade. We argue that the discussion should shift from whether or not biotic interactions are relevant to species distributions, to at what scale do these patterns manifest and how do we integrate our understanding of processes acting at different spatial scales. The fundamental challenge to addressing the role of biotic interactions is that it requires bridging theoretical, process-based models of species interaction networks with spatially explicit, correlative models of species geographic distributions. Further, available information to build these models ranges from individual-based, biophysical effects of climate change, to global occurrence records. Thus, bridging the gap between these disciplines requires a synthesis of current methods, a conceptualization of how these methods can be integrated, and a discussion about emerging methods. We have invited speakers from a diversity of ecological disciplines to spark a discussion about the role of species interactions in species distributions from both a conceptual and applied perspective. We specifically ask speakers to address what they think are the most pressing challenges to incorporating biotic interactions into predictive species distribution models and to improving the accuracy of predictions about the effects of climate change on ecological communities.