HOME IS WHERE YOUR NICHE IS – SPECIES DISTRIBUTION MODELS IN FORAMINIFERAL RESEARCH

Species distribution models (SDMs) have become important tools in biogeography and biodiversity research over the last decades. They are mainly based on the fundamental niche concept and allow the correlative prediction of species' potential distributional ranges by combining occurrence records with information on environmental (e.g. climatic) conditions. The generated environmental envelope of a species is projected into geographic space, thus defining areas of adequate habitat suitability. The applications of SDMs are diverse and range from the evaluation of the invasive potential of alien species to the prediction of range shifts driven by climate change as well as the estimation of the extinction risk and necessity of species conservation strategies. The majority of SDMs has been applied to terrestrial organisms, targeting on temperature and precipitation as important factors determining species' distributions. Currently, the concept of modeling species distributions via climatic requirements is being transferred to marine organisms. In these approaches, conventional climate data are replaced by oceanographic parameters like sea surface temperature, salinity and ion concentrations, available from global datasets (NASA, WOD).

We introduce SDM applications in foraminiferal research, demonstrating the variety of applications in biogeographic and biodiversity-based studies. Foraminifera are well suitable to SDMs since the influence of environmental conditions to their distributional range has been sufficiently documented for a long time. We modeled potential range shifts in selected symbiont-bearing foraminifera at the global scale over the next 40 years (Borelis spp., Calcarina spp., Alveolinella quoyi, Archaias angulatus). Our results suggest a multitude of applications of SDMs in foraminiferal research and provide innovative avenues of research for environmental and biogeographic studies.