Yet researchers have long criticized the field for a fundamental scale mismatch. A review cited in the study found that the grid cells of environmental data used in previous analyses were roughly 10,000 times larger than the body length of the focal animal species, and about 1,000 times larger for plants. For an animal whose home range spans just 1,822 to 11,530 square meters, a climate grid cell covering nearly 640,000 square meters smooths away precisely the topographic complexity that shapes its daily experience.

The coarse-resolution model used temperature data at 30 arcseconds, equivalent to grid cells of about 691 by 926 meters. The fine-resolution model downscaled the same data to 3 arcseconds, producing cells of roughly 69 by 93 meters that better reflect the ambient air conditions an individual pika actually encounters. In the rugged terrain of central Hokkaido, the difference is dramatic: within a single coarse grid cell, elevation can vary by as much as 770 meters, with a median difference of 182 meters, conditions that the coarse data simply cannot represent.

To build the models, the team compiled 305 presence records from published literature spanning 1963 to 2009, covering elevations from 50 to 2,210 meters. Most detections came from pika vocalizations, supplemented by direct sightings, haypiles, feces, and feeding marks. After spatial thinning to reduce sampling bias, 91 presence points remained for model fitting.

The researchers used the maximum entropy algorithm, MaxEnt, chosen for its consistently strong performance in comparative studies, and carefully tuned its hyperparameters to avoid overfitting. Predictor variables included mean summer temperature and diurnal temperature range for July and August, terrain slope angle derived from a high-resolution digital elevation model, and surface geology, since 99 percent of the known pika distribution in the region lies on igneous and metamorphic rocks and moraines. The results confirmed the first hypothesis: the fine-resolution model outperformed the coarse-resolution model, achieving a Continuous Boyce Index of 0.80 compared with 0.73.

Mean summer temperature dominated both models, accounting for roughly 75 percent of permutation importance, with a strong negative effect on occurrence probability. Surface geology ranked second, contributing around 18 to 20 percent. Notably, the response curve for temperature was steeper in the fine-resolution model, indicating that the finer data allowed the model to fit more accurately toward the cooler conditions pikas prefer.

Hindcasting to the period 1961 to 1980 further validated both models, with the fine-resolution model reaching a hindcast CBI of 0.96, demonstrating strong transferability across time. Pikas living in rocky landforms experience what the authors call a duality in thermal conditions. Above ground, they forage, vocalize, and collect vegetation for their winter haypiles, exposed to ambient air temperatures.

Below ground, they retreat into the interstices between rocks, which are buffered from surface heat and remain cool and stable. Previous field measurements in the study area had established an empirical relationship between ambient and interstice temperatures, allowing the researchers to convert their downscaled air temperature data into rock-interstice microclimate data for grid cells containing rocky landforms in three representative regions: Biei at 1,100 to 2,000 meters, Shikaribetsu at 600 to 1,250 meters, and Oketo at 400 to 800 meters. Incorporating this sub-ground microclimate transformed the predictions.

Habitat suitability in areas with rocky landforms was significantly higher in the microclimate-based predictions than in either the coarse-resolution model or the fine-resolution model based on ambient air alone. The researchers categorized locations into three combinations of above-ground and below-ground suitability: high-high, low-high, and low-low. Areas with low-high suitability, where ambient air is too warm but rock interstices remain cool, may function as habitat if pikas can behaviorally adapt, spending time above ground during cooler parts of the day and retreating below when heat stress builds, a flexibility documented in both northern pikas and their American relatives.

Under both the sustainable SSP1-2.6 and fossil-fuel-intensive SSP5-8.5 emission scenarios, and for both the 2041 to 2070 and 2071 to 2100 periods, models based on ambient air temperature predicted that more than 60 percent of suitable habitat would disappear compared with the baseline period of 1981 to 2010. Under the high-emission scenario, losses continued through the century, while under the lower-emission scenario the range appeared to stabilize after mid-century. Yet when rock-interstice microclimates were factored in, pikas were predicted to persist in nearly all three study regions across all future scenarios, with the sole exception of low-elevation Oketo under the far-future SSP5-8.5 scenario.

The discrepancies between the two prediction approaches were greatest at lower elevations and under the higher emission pathway. Coarse-resolution models risk overlooking microrefugia, the small pockets of favorable conditions where species can persist even as surrounding landscapes become unsuitable. Such overestimation of range shifts could lead conservation planners to misallocate protected areas and management resources.

The study also acknowledges its limitations: rocky landforms are highly heterogeneous, with temperatures varying by height and depth and across seasons, so the modeled microclimates remain a simplified representation of reality. Other factors such as precipitation and snow cover, which influence pika habitat suitability, were not considered, and the lack of extensive high-resolution mapping of rocky landforms restricted the microclimate analysis to three regions. Analyzing species distributions at biologically relevant scales, and accounting for the vertical heterogeneity of thermal conditions within a single landscape, can fundamentally alter assessments of climate vulnerability.

The authors advocate for systematic identification of rocky landforms to integrate microclimates into conservation planning, and for continued monitoring to verify whether the behavioral flexibility pikas display in avoiding heat translates into maintained populations over time.

Subject of Research: Fine-scale species distribution modeling of the northern pika incorporating rock-interstice microclimates in Hokkaido, Japan

Article Title: Mapping fine-scale distribution of the northern pika Ochotona hyperborea considering duality in microhabitat thermal conditions

Article References: Sakiyama, T., & García Molinos, J. (2025). Mapping fine-scale distribution of the northern pika Ochotona hyperborea considering duality in microhabitat thermal conditions. Frontiers of Biogeography, 18, Article e131541. https://doi.org/10.21425/fob.18.131541

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.21425/fob.18.131541

Keywords: northern pika, species distribution models, microclimate, climate change, Hokkaido, rock interstices, MaxEnt, habitat suitability, microrefugia, thermal buffering, conservation biogeography, downscaling

The review defines rainforest refugia as regions of climatic stability where rainforests and their associated biota persisted through cold and arid periods, and from which species could later expand once conditions improved. These areas act as evolutionary lifeboats: they buffer populations against extinction, preserve deep lineages, and can seed the recolonization of landscapes after the climate relents. Understanding where refugia were located and how they functioned is not merely an academic exercise. Because refugia can mitigate the adverse impacts of contemporary climate change, they are increasingly recognized as priority targets for conservation planning.

The evidence for dramatic vegetation swings in West Africa comes most directly from fossil pollen cores extracted from marine and lake sediments. Deep-sea cores from the Gulf of Guinea, including one near the Nigerian coastline that traces vegetation change over the last ten million years, reveal repeated shifts from closed rainforest to more open vegetation as aridity intensified. Lake cores offer finer, more localized records; the longest continuous archive, from Lake Bosumtwi in southern Ghana, spans roughly 1.08 million years and documents the repeated local disappearance of rainforests during Pleistocene glaciations. Notably, no pollen records yet exist from West African highland regions, leaving a conspicuous gap in the palaeoecological record precisely where some hypothesized refugia may have sheltered forests that captured moisture from stratiform clouds and orographic rainfall.

When pollen data are combined with comparative biogeographic analyses of plants, mammals and birds, a consistent set of large-scale refugia emerges. Regions such as Mount Nimba, Cape Palmas, Cape Three Points and the Niger Delta have been repeatedly identified as areas of long-term climatic stability, and independent diversity surveys confirm elevated species richness and endemism in exactly these places. By contrast, the Dahomey Gap, a dry corridor receiving only around 700 millimetres of annual rainfall between southern-central Ghana and Benin, and the V-Baoulé savannah intrusion in central Côte d’Ivoire were never proposed as refugia, marking them as historically unstable zones that species likely abandoned during arid phases.

Phylogeography, which examines the spatial arrangement of genetic lineages within species, has largely corroborated these large-scale refugia while simultaneously revealing a hidden layer of structure. Across plants, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, birds and fish, recurrent phylogeographic breaks align with major rivers such as the Bandama, Volta, Niger and Cross, as well as with climatically unstable regions. These breaks partition West African rainforests into four well-established sub-regions: Western Upper Guinea, Eastern Upper Guinea, the Dahomey Gap and Western Lower Guinea. Crucially, fine-scale comparative studies of leaf-litter frogs and forest-dwelling rodents uncovered smaller isolated pockets, termed microrefugia, nested within and beyond the classic macrorefugia. Some of these microrefugia, notably in the Fouta Djallon highlands of Guinea and in Ghana, harbour lineages stretching back to the Miocene, suggesting stability over millions of years, while others appear to have persisted only through the more recent Pleistocene aridification cycles.

The timing of these evolutionary splits presents an intriguing puzzle. While phylogeographic patterns are broadly congruent across species, the divergence dates themselves are frequently asynchronous, even among co-distributed species analysed with the same genetic markers. Splits fall predominantly within the Pleistocene but vary widely, and the use of different markers with varying confidence intervals complicates direct comparison. This asynchrony implies that identical spatial patterns may arise from distinct underlying causes, whether climate-driven fragmentation, river barriers or ecological gradients, and underscores the need for standardized analytical frameworks before broad generalizations can be drawn.

To move beyond mapping refugia toward quantifying their evolutionary role, researchers have turned to demographic modelling and species distribution modelling. Demographic approaches compare observed genetic data against simulations run under competing models of diversification: the refugia model, in which populations diverge in isolation and later expand and meet again; the landscape barrier model, in which populations split in strict isolation on opposite sides of a physical obstacle; and the ecotone model, in which divergence occurs alongside continuous gene flow. Studies on West and Central African reptiles and amphibians predominantly support the refugia model, though it has been rejected in favour of barrier or ecotone scenarios for species with broader ecological tolerances, such as arboreal snakes that also inhabit dry forest-savannah mosaics.

Species distribution modelling offers an independent, mechanistic lens on the same question. By correlating species occurrences with environmental variables and projecting those niches back to the Last Interglacial period roughly 125,000 years ago, researchers have reconstructed how suitable habitat expanded and contracted across glacial cycles. The models consistently reveal significant range fluctuations for nearly all examined taxa, from frogs and chimpanzees to forest trees, with the notable exception of the ecologically flexible arboreal snakes. Climatic stability maps derived from these projections tend to incorporate the known refugia of Cape Palmas, Cape Three Points, Mount Nimba and the Niger Delta, while Western Upper Guinea and Western Lower Guinea emerge as extensively stable regions, in contrast to the more fragmented stability hotspots of Eastern Upper Guinea.

The review’s authors emphasize that refugia are not the sole engine of diversification in West Africa, but they played a key role in driving the evolution of rainforest-dependent species in combination with other factors such as river barriers. Ecological traits matter enormously: closely related tree species in the Dahomey Gap responded to the same aridification cycles with different timing of population splits and colonization events, depending on subtle differences in habitat preference and dispersal biology. This species-specific variability means that predicting how rainforest biota will respond to ongoing climate change requires understanding not just where refugia were, but how individual species interacted with them across time.

Looking forward, the authors call for research that spans a broader range of taxa, explores lesser-known regions such as the Fouta Djallon highlands and the Niger Delta, and adopts landscape demography approaches that account for the diverse forest habitats of West Africa, from evergreen lowland to montane forest. Advances in high-throughput sequencing, long-read technologies and integrative bioinformatic tools that combine genomic data with distribution models promise to sharpen the resolution of refugia dynamics across both space and time. As West African rainforests, which have already lost more than 80 percent of their former cover, face intensifying drought and rising temperatures, the lessons encoded in their refugial past may prove the most valuable guide to securing their future.

Subject of Research: Evolutionary refugia in West African rainforests and their role in biodiversity

Article Title: Towards a comprehensive view on evolutionary refugia in West African rainforests

Article References: Ernst, M., Rödel, M.-O., & Blom, M. P. K. (2025). Towards a comprehensive view on evolutionary refugia in West African rainforests. Frontiers of Biogeography, 18, Article e139537. https://doi.org/10.21425/fob.18.139537

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.21425/fob.18.139537

Keywords: West Africa, rainforests, refugia, phylogeography, climate change, biodiversity, palaeoecology, species distribution modelling, demographic modelling, Guinean Forests, microrefugia, Pleistocene

Relict populations like these are of outsized importance for conservation biology. When climate change or other catastrophic events shrink the range of a widespread species, small refugia can shield remnant populations from extinction. Such pockets often harbor unique genetic information that has been lost elsewhere in the species’ range, and they can serve as sources for future recolonization. For S. cingulata, the northern populations are small in numbers of individuals, occupy only very limited areas, and are considered locally endangered, particularly because of habitat alteration. Understanding their origins is therefore not just an academic exercise but a prerequisite for protecting them.

The new work builds on a discovery that made headlines among Central European naturalists several years ago. The first Austrian population of the giant centipede, in Burgenland near the Hungarian border, was rediscovered and subjected to molecular analysis, which showed that the isolated populations in Romania, Hungary and Austria likely have independent origins. However, that earlier study could not propose a clear hypothesis about where the Austrian animals specifically had come from. Because Austria, despite its small size, has a very large and active community of naturalists and zoologists, the researchers hoped that publishing their initial findings would prompt reports of additional populations of this conspicuous large invertebrate.

That hope was realized. Professor E. Christian of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna reported a second locality, just five kilometers from the previously described population. The site was visited in 2015 in the company of Dr. Andreas Ranner of the nature and environmental protection office of the Burgenland provincial government, and the presence of the giant centipede was confirmed. Two juvenile specimens were collected under permit and deposited as vouchers at the Zoological Research Museum A. Koenig in Bonn, where their DNA barcodes could be sequenced. Notably, the exact localities of the Austrian populations are not disclosed in the publication, because wild-caught specimens of this long-lived, charismatic invertebrate are commonly offered for sale in the pet trade, and private collectors could severely deplete the small populations.

The second Austrian population lives on an exposed south-facing slope with scattered rocks and shrubs, the same kind of warm microhabitat as the first population. Adults are amber colored with yellow legs and a dark longitudinal dorsal stripe, while juveniles are greyish-blue with an orange head and last tergite, blue legs and a black dorsal stripe. The coloration matches what was described for the first Austrian population. Genetically, however, the two newly sequenced juveniles carried two different haplotypes of the mitochondrial COI gene, differing at 11 positions, or 1.7 percent of the sequence. One haplotype was identical to some found in the first Austrian population, while the second differed from the first population by up to 3.0 percent, immediately signaling that the genetic diversity within Austria was greater than previously appreciated.

To place these new sequences in context, the team assembled a dataset of 31 COI sequences: 29 of S. cingulata from 16 populations spanning France, Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Greece and Turkey, plus two sequences of the related species Scolopendra canidens as an outgroup. The sequences were aligned with the MUSCLE algorithm, and genetic distances were computed in MEGA X using uncorrected pairwise distances across all codon positions. Phylogenetic relationships were reconstructed under the maximum likelihood criterion in IQ-TREE, with the best-fitting substitution model selected by the Bayesian information criterion and branch support estimated from 1,000 bootstrap replicates. The result was a robust framework for testing competing scenarios about the history of the northern populations.

The phylogenetic analysis delivered a striking result. The Croatian specimen and one haplotype from the second Austrian population fall together with the first Austrian population into a single well-supported clade, and the second, more divergent Austrian haplotype sits at the base of that same Croatian-Austrian group. In other words, the Austrian centipedes are not an isolated oddity but are closely related to the population on the Istrian coast of Croatia, from which they differ by only about 2.0 percent on average. By contrast, the genetic distances to the more eastern populations are much larger: 6.0 percent to Romania and 7.6 percent to Hungary. The Hungarian and Romanian specimens, together with Greek mainland populations and specimens from the Greek islands Koufonisi and Paros, form a separate clade, although that grouping received weaker statistical support.

These patterns point to a clear biogeographic conclusion. The close relationship between the Austrian and Croatian centipedes indicates that the northern-most populations of the species were colonized independently, possibly from separate refugia, after the last glacial period. At least two separate recolonization routes must be hypothesized: one from the west, via Croatia into Austria, and one from the east, via Greece or the Balkans into Hungary and Romania. This dual-route scenario agrees with what has been suggested for multiple groups of insects in the region. The earlier idea proposed by Attems in 1930, that the northern populations arose by gradual speciation along a distance gradient, cannot explain the observed distribution and relationships. The authors caution, however, that denser geographic sampling and population genetic markers with higher resolution will be needed to fully unravel the phylogeographic history of the species in the region.

The study also underscores how much unique genetic information these tiny refugia can contain. Within the first rediscovered Austrian population, genetic distances were low, yet the population carried a haplotype unique within the species. The second locality expands the known Austrian diversity considerably, highlighting the importance of small and fragile populations for the overall genetic diversity of a species. Across the full dataset, the maximum intraspecific genetic distance, 11.9 percent between an Austrian and a French specimen, is consistent with earlier findings of average distances of about 11 percent between clades of S. cingulata in southern Italy, suggesting substantial deep divergence across the species’ Mediterranean range.

Conservation implications follow directly from the genetics. Although no attempts have been made to formally quantify and monitor the Austrian populations, yearly excursion reports by the research team offer worrying hints. Large numbers of adults and sub-adults were observed in 2015 and 2016, but the 2017 report documented an unexpected rarity of the species, and a site visit in 2018 found only juveniles. The populations may therefore be small and subject to fluctuations in size. Given the unique genetic information they harbor, their habitats should be treated as important targets for protection. That argument is reinforced by the company the centipedes keep: the first Austrian population shares its habitat with the only known Austrian population of the centipede Cryptops croaticus and with the endangered ground beetle Carabus hungaricus. Protecting these warm south-facing slopes safeguards not just one charismatic giant centipede but an entire assemblage of thermophilic species clinging to the northern edge of their ranges, living remnants of a post-glacial world whose stories are only now being read from their DNA.

Subject of Research: Phylogeography and post-glacial origins of the northern microrefugial populations of the giant centipede Scolopendra cingulata

Article Title: Origins of the northern microrefugial populations of the giant centipede Scolopendra cingulata Latreille, 1829 revealed ( Chilopoda , Scolopendromorpha , Scolopendridae )

Article References: Oeyen, J. P., Moritz, L., & Wesener, T. (2026). Origins of the northern microrefugial populations of the giant centipede Scolopendra cingulata Latreille, 1829 revealed (Chilopoda, Scolopendromorpha, Scolopendridae). Evolutionary Systematics, 10(2), 275-281. https://doi.org/10.3897/evolsyst.10.205134

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/evolsyst.10.205134

Keywords: Scolopendra cingulata, giant centipede, microrefugia, phylogeography, COI barcoding, post-glacial recolonization, Austria, Croatia, Hungary, relict populations, conservation, Evolutionary Systematics

The Atlas cedar, Cedrus atlantica, is an emblematic conifer endemic to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria, growing between roughly 1,300 and 2,200 meters on well-drained limestone and siliceous soils. It is a keystone species that regulates watershed soils and local climate, supports biodiversity, and carries deep cultural and economic value through its durable, aromatic timber. Yet the species has been in serious decline for decades. Dendroecological records across Morocco and Algeria show multi-decadal growth losses and rising drought sensitivity since the late twentieth century, driven by intensifying drought, heat stress, and warming-facilitated biotic attacks such as pine processionary moth outbreaks. The International Union for Conservation of Nature now classifies the species as endangered, and Algeria’s natural cedar forests have been reduced to small, fragmented relicts in the high mountains.

Chelia National Park, centered on Mount Chelia at 2,328 meters, contains one of the largest remaining cedar stands in the country, but even here recent surveys have documented drought-induced dieback alongside human pressures including overgrazing and illegal logging. While regional modeling studies have projected significant range contractions for Atlas cedar across North Africa, and Moroccan analyses have predicted habitat losses of 21 to 41 percent by 2070 depending on emissions, comparable local-scale analyses for Algeria have been lacking. Conservation planning in Chelia had not previously incorporated model-based climate projections, leaving managers without a quantitative picture of the park’s climatic future.

To fill that gap, the research team, led by Hichem Chenaker and Rami Khoucha of the Higher National School of Forests in Khenchela with colleagues from Iraq and Egypt, compiled 107 unique occurrence points from field GPS surveys conducted between 2022 and 2026 and from official park vegetation maps. To avoid pseudo-replication, the team assigned a single presence point to each mapped cedar stand rather than populating large polygons with many points, a design that also enforced natural spacing between records. The study area spans a Mediterranean montane climate in which most precipitation falls in winter, roughly 110 millimeters in January, while summers are extremely dry with only about 10 millimeters in July, and mean annual temperature falls from around 10 degrees Celsius at low elevations to near freezing at the highest peaks.

The researchers modeled habitat suitability with MaxEnt version 3.4.4, deliberately calibrating the model only within the park boundary to align its inference space with local management needs. Environmental predictors were assembled at one-kilometer resolution from WorldClim bioclimatic variables and NASADEM elevation data, then filtered for multicollinearity using a Pearson correlation threshold of 0.7 and a variance inflation factor cutoff of five. The final predictor set included mean diurnal range, isothermality, temperature seasonality, minimum temperature of the coldest month, temperatures of the wettest and driest quarters, precipitation of the driest month, precipitation seasonality, and elevation. Model performance was evaluated with ten-fold cross-validation, achieving an AUC of 0.83, a reasonable score given the restricted environmental gradients of the park, and transferability to future climates was checked with clamping and multivariate environmental similarity surface, or MESS, analyses.

Future projections drew on the WorldClim v2.1 CMIP6 multi-model ensemble, which averages bias-corrected outputs from eight major global climate models, under two emissions pathways: the intermediate SSP2-4.5 and the high-end SSP5-8.5, for the 2050 and 2070 time windows. The team applied a single 10th-percentile training presence threshold across all projections to keep the maps comparable, and classified the continuous suitability output into four classes. Under present-day conditions, only about 10.5 percent of the park’s 326 square kilometers, or 34.2 square kilometers, qualifies as highly suitable, nearly all of it in the high-elevation core southeast of the Chelia summit. Roughly 18 percent is moderately suitable, 7 percent weakly suitable, and the remaining 64 percent is already unsuitable, meaning the cedar is confined to narrow microclimates even today.

The future looks starker. Under the moderate SSP2-4.5 scenario, highly suitable habitat declines to about 8.9 percent of the park by 2050 and 7.9 percent by 2070, while unsuitable area expands to 66.3 percent, a net loss of nearly a quarter of the current prime habitat within half a century. Under the high-emission SSP5-8.5 pathway, losses arrive faster, with unsuitable conditions covering more than 67 percent of the park by 2070 and the remaining high-quality patches few, isolated, and concentrated in the east-central highlands near the highest peaks. MESS analysis showed that future climates in the high-elevation core remained within the range of the training data under all scenarios, while novel climates appeared only in low-elevation peripheries that are already unsuitable, lending confidence to the projections for the areas that matter most. Because the model was calibrated only within the park, the authors caution that these figures are conservative estimates of habitat loss.

One of the study’s most important contributions is its careful interpretation of why winter cold emerged as the dominant predictor. The minimum temperature of the coldest month, BIO6, accounted for more than 60 percent of the model’s explanatory power, followed by elevation at 17.8 percent and precipitation seasonality at 10.5 percent. Rather than reading this as a simple preference for cold, the authors interpret BIO6 as a proxy for elevation-linked humidity, snow persistence, and reduced summer water deficit. In Supramediterranean mountain systems, altitude and terrain features such as north-facing slopes and shaded ravines function as microrefugia by buffering heat load and vapor pressure deficit, so the coolest sites are frequently the moistest sites. Field observations support this: cedar stands cluster in cool, shaded topographic positions while lower slopes and ridgelines are largely cedar-free. As warming proceeds, the model suggests that precipitation seasonality and warm-season temperatures gain weight, pointing to intensifying summer drought as the central constraint on persistence. The authors also note that biological interactions, such as pest outbreaks, can act as ultimate drivers of local extinction in marginal cedar populations, guarding against an overly climate-deterministic reading.

The findings align with regional evidence from Morocco and Algeria, where modeling and tree-ring studies consistently show Atlas cedar tracking more humid conditions and suffering under warming and aridification, and with similar patterns in other Mediterranean montane conifers such as Spanish fir and European black pine. For Chelia, the authors propose an adaptive conservation strategy that goes beyond temperature-based upslope relocation: protecting high-elevation microrefugia, restoring habitat connectivity, assisted enrichment planting within refugial sites, seed banking and genetic conservation, and managing local stressors such as overgrazing, illegal logging, and fire. Critically, they argue that hydrological buffering deserves explicit attention, since riparian corridors, spring-fed slopes, and areas with shallow groundwater access act as natural drought refuges. The projected 25 percent contraction of highly suitable habitat by 2070, even under a low-emissions pathway, speaks directly to Sustainable Development Goal targets on climate action and life on land. The team acknowledges limitations, including niche truncation from local calibration, the absence of soil and disturbance data, and coarse climate inputs, and recommends future work with ensemble models, hierarchical regional-local approaches, finer downscaling, and quantitative fragmentation metrics to refine the outlook for Algeria’s vanishing cedars.

Subject of Research: Modeling current and future climate-driven habitat suitability of the endangered Atlas cedar in Chelia National Park, Algeria

Article Title: Climate resilience of Atlas cedar: habitat suitability modeling for climate action and life on land

Article References: Chenaker, H., Khoucha, R., Al-Quraishi, A. M. F., Atalla, M. A., & Bedair, H. (2026). Climate resilience of Atlas cedar: habitat suitability modeling for climate action and life on land. Discover Ecology, 2(1), Article 14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44396-026-00032-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44396-026-00032-1

Keywords: Atlas cedar, Cedrus atlantica, species distribution modeling, MaxEnt, climate change, Chelia National Park, habitat fragmentation, microrefugia, CMIP6, conservation planning, Mediterranean forests, Algeria