A non-equilibrium species distribution model reveals unprecedented depth of time lag responses to past environmental change trajectories

International audience ; Previous studies have demonstrated legacy effects of current species distributions to past environmental conditions, but the temporal extent of such time lag dynamics remains unknown. Here, we have developed a non-equilibrium SDM approach quantifying the temporal extent that must be taken into account to capture 95 % of the effect that a given time series of past environmental conditions has on the current distribution of a species. We applied this approach on the distribution of 92 European forest birds in response to past trajectories of change in forest cover and climate. We found that non-equilibrium SDMs outperformed traditional SDMs for 95 % of the species. Nonequilibrium SDMs suggest unprecedented long-lasting effects of past global changes (average time lag extent ranged from 9 years to 231 years). This framework can help to relax the equilibrium 3 hypothesis of traditional SDMs and to improve future predictions of biodiversity redistribution in response to global changes.