Emerging horizons in predictive biogeography

The notion that different branches of biological sciences -including ecology, macroecology, and biogeography -should adopt a predictive focus rather than merely aiming to describe and understand the natural world has gained traction over the past decades (Peters 1991, Shrader-Frechette andMcCoy 1993).This trend has been enabled both by technological advancement leading to new predictive frameworks, and by the pressing societal demands to anticipate and mitigate the effects of global change on biodiversity and the associated ecosystem services.An early example of this trend is the work by Sánchez-Cordero et al. ( 2004) who contributed a chapter on predictive biogeography for conservation applications in a seminal volume on biogeography (Lomolino and Heaney 2004).While the authors did not explicitly define the term predictive biogeography, their discussion emphasized how developments in statistical ecology and mapping had allowed the description of species distributions at large spatial scales.Similarly, Thuiller et al. (2006) employed the concept of predictive biogeography in the restricted context of describing the use of stacked species distribution models (SDMs) in predicting plant richness in South Africa.Dawson et al. (2011) subsequently highlighted SDMs as the most widely used predictive method in biogeography, but also called attention on the importance of establishing broader frameworks to anticipate changes in biodiversity, from species to ecosystems, in response to climate change.There are other biogeographic patterns that are widely used in a predictive context.Most notably, the species area relationships (SARs), which have also been important to understand and predict species extinctions (Drakare et al. 2006) driven by anthropogenic habitat fragmentation for example.However, the widespread use of SDMs, along with the fact that they remain the method of choice at large scales in ecology, has been repeatedly highlighted (Bellard et al. 2012, Araújo et al. 2019, Zurell et al. 2020, Soley-Guardia et al. 2024).Mapping biodiversity remains an essential component of large-scale spatial conservation planning

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