Head of Botanical Collections Field Museum Chicago, Illinois, United States
Abstract: Bryophytes are environmentally and ecologically significant biological indicators, as their distribution is largely determined by the climate and the land features that shape these factors. Yet it is a challenge to track the ranges of these plants and even more so to predict their future distributions due to their small size and sensitivity to environmental change. This study aims to model the potential distribution of selected bryophyte species in Illinois to investigate the impact of global warming and determine what environmental factors affect distribution patterns. Bryophyte occurrences post 1970 of some of the most common epiphytic species and genera were explored. Over 12000 georeferenced occurrence records were downloaded from a public biodiversity aggregator, cleaned, and validated. The environmental variables consisted of the WorldClim Bioclim variables and National Land Cover Database land use variables, filtered to remove correlation. The occurrences and environmental variables were run through a MaxEnt model in R to generate heat maps of potential distribution. Model accuracy was evaluated on their AUC and compared to 2022 collections from the Nachusa Grasslands State Park. Attempting to quantify bryophyte-environment relationships and ecological niche modeling potentially provides a means of predicting how bryophytes might respond to environmental changes in the future. Using such techniques enables us to test for significant differences in the characterization of niches between taxa. Successful models will not only show support for utilizing bryophytes as climate change indicators, but also for this open-source methodology in the niche modeling for other organisms. Overall, these results will have important implications for conservation, land management and our understanding of ecological niche modeling using a poorly studied and overlooked group of plants.
