Downscaling European species atlas distributions to a finer resolution: implications for conservation planning

Aim One of the limitations to using species' distribution atlases in conservation planning is their coarse resolution relative to the needs of local planners. In this study, a simple approach to downscale original species atlas distributions to a finer resolution is outlined. If such a procedure yielded accurate downscaled predictions, then it could be an aid to using available distribution atlases in real-world local conservation decisions. Location Europe. Methods An iterative procedure based on generalized additive modelling is used to downscale original European 50 x 50 km distributions of 2189 plant and terrestrial vertebrate species to c. 10 x 10 km grid resolution. Models are trained on 70% of the original data and evaluated on the remaining 30%, using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) procedure. Fitted models are then interpolated to a finer resolution. A British dataset comprising distributions of 81 passerine-bird species in a 10 x 10 km grid is used as a test bed to assess the accuracy of the downscaled predictions. European-wide, downscaled predictions are further evaluated in terms of their ability to reproduce: (1) spatial patterns of coincidence in species richness scores among different groups; and (2) spatial patterns of coincidence in richness, rarity and complementarity hotspots. Results There was a generally good agreement between downscaled and observed fine-resolution distributions for passerine species in Britain (median Jaccard similarity = 70%; lower quartile = 36%; upper quartile = 88%). In contrast, the correlation between downscaled and observed passerine species richness was relatively low (rho = 0.31) indicating a pattern of error propagation through the process of overlaying downscaled distributions for many species. It was also found that measures of model accuracy in fitting original data (ROC) were a poor predictor of models' ability to interpolate distributions at fine resolutions (rho = -0.10). Although European hotspots were not fully coincident between observed and modelled coarse-resolution data, or between modelled coarse resolution and modelled downscaled data, there was evidence that downscaled distributions were able to maintain original cross-taxon coincidence of species-richness scores, at least for terrestrial vertebrate groups. Downscaled distributions were also able to uncover important environmental gradients otherwise blurred by coarse-resolution data. Main conclusions Despite uncertainties, downscaling procedures may prove useful to identify reserves that are more meaningfully related to local patterns of environmental variation. Potential errors arising from the presence of false positives may be reduced if downscaled-distribution records projected to occur outside the range of original coarse-resolution data are excluded. However, the usefulness of this procedure may be limited to data-rich regions. If downscaling procedures are applied to data-poor regions, then there is a need to undertake further research to understand the structure of error in models. In particular, it would be important to investigate which species are poorly modelled, where and why. Without such an assessment it is difficult to support unsupervised use of downscaled data in most real-world situations.