Species-Distribution Modeling: Advantages and Limitations of Its Application. 1. General Approaches

For a long time, studies of the distribution of living beings in a geographical space were performed only with empirical methods. A change in the view of a species distribution as a projection of a Hutchinsonian ecological niche led to the formation of the discipline of ecological modeling of the species distribution, which switched faunistics/floristics from data accumulation to a full-fledged scientific industry with experiment planning and result verification. The various methods of species-distribution modeling make it possible to analyze the patterns of the geographical distributional of organisms in the presence of methodological challenges: nonrandomness of the occurrence data, inhomogeneity of the collection efforts, landscape heterogeneity in different scales, etc. The results of species-distribution modeling represent spatially continuous data of habitat suitability and are valuable not only for studies of the habitats themselves but also for a number of disciplines that involve species distributions.