There is  quite a bit literature using so called clmate envelopes for species range modelling. (I do not know which of the numerous publications would be a good starting point). You should be careful with edaphic and mangement factors in your data.

 Also abundance data might be more useful than presence absence data.

You might perhaps want to look at the Gloria projects website which partly tries to do things similar to you. http://www.gloria.ac.at/

Ciao Alessandro,

I agree that maybe a different measure of relative abundance is better than presence/absence (P/A). You may lose some information and it may be a bit tricky to analyse.

Assuming that you are going to survey over the time I'd suggest to have a look at the chapter 6 of this document (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/MARSS/vignettes/UserGuide.pdf). State Space Time Series Analysis are used to estimate extinction and quasi-extinction risk. In the page VI(4) are the authors' website links with much more information.

Below there some links that may be useful as well:

Influence of environmental variables on fishing and biological variables analysed using Dynamic Factor Analysis (DFA). Again, assuming that you are going to analyse time series of abundance. The chapter 9 of the document above deals with DFA.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12237-013-9658-4

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.12514/pdf

Influence of environmental variables on biological variables analysed using GAM

http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FALR%2FALR18_04%2FS0990744005000379a.pdf&code=22cf1e54c1c7bfbfd69390f92ddf4fcd

Hope something of this information is useful for your project.

Good luck

You might want to check out the BioMove model to see whether you can apply it to your situation. It has been applied in California. Below are some URLs

http://www.biogeog.ucsb.edu/research/assessment-impacts-climate-change-vegetation-california

http://climate.calcommons.org/bib/biomove-%E2%80%93-creation-complex-and-dynamic-model-assessing-impacts-climate-change-california

http://www.energy.ca.gov/2008publications/CEC-500-2008-060/CEC-500-2008-060.PDF

In general, there are what are called dynamic vegetation models used to examine issues like shifts in species ranges due to climate or other forcing.  Two examples of DVMs are MC1 and LPJ-GUESS.

Go to the recent publications (Pauli et al., Gottfried et al. in Nature and Science, respectively, both 2012) from the GLORIA network (gloria.ac.at).

Cheers,

Ulf

Hello again. Since you have presence and absence data, you might want to examine some of the work James Thorne (University of California at Davis) has done measuring and modeling the elevational and geographic shifts of species in the Sierra Nevada.  If you point your browser to

http://www.energy.ca.gov/publications/pier_search.php

and enter Thorne in the author search, it will return a number of publications. He's also easy to find on UCD's faculty web pages.

You might also take a look at the RangeShifter platform. See also below a reference to a paper illustrating the elegance of the application to grasslands in Britain.

Bocedi, G., Palmer, S.C.F., Pe’er, G., Heikkinen, R.K., Matsinos, Y.G., Watts, K. et al. 2014 RangeShifter: a platform for modelling spatial eco-evolutionary dynamics and species’ responses to environmental changes. 5, 388-396.

For plant data you could use models related to changes in average soil temperature and water content as well as changes in number of frost/freeze days.  Grapes (wine industry) is definitely sensitive to this and has been an early harbinger for climate change

I see from the replies above that a number of people have provided links, many of them useful, to modelling tools and exercises. However, a the outputs of a modelling tool are no better than the data and the ecological understanding and insights used to set it up. Usually people say "garbage in - garbage out" only with reference to data but I think what you know about the system is at least as critical. Think about the system and think about what could be the determining abiotic factors (e.g. minimum temperatures, duration and intensity of the dry season) as well as the biotic factors (e.g. life history and physiology of your species, mobility) and habitat factors.

I suspect from your address that your study is probably in South Africa and most of South Africa's vegetation is fire prone. This means that you need to understand not only how the climate may change but also how that may alter fire regimes and that could affect your vegetation types and species. I would recommend speaking to Prof Mark Robertson (U Pretoria).or Prof Barend Erasmus (Wits) about your project as they can also provide guidance.

Perhaps the article "Climate change and the outdoor regional living plant collections: an example from mainland Portugal" can help you. I´m the co-author with Tiago Monteiro Henriques, an expert in modelling.

Have a look a this:

DOI: 10.1111/j.0906-7590.2008.5203.x

Steven J. Phillips andMiroslav Dudík

Modeling of species distributions with Maxent: new extensions and a comprehensive evaluation

Ecography 31

I associated the question with our article, may be useful:

Regional climate and geology affecting habitat availability for a relict plant in a plain landscape: the case of Festuca amethystina L. in Poland

Plant Ecology & Diversity (Impact Factor: 0.92). 04/2014; DOI: 10.1080/17550874.2014.904951

Thomas, maybe also have a look at the body of work available for download via the link below:

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/John_Coll2/publications 

The 2014 'Climate Research' paper may also be of interest - we believe this was a first application of BIOMOD to binary habitat data with elevation information included in the covariates.  Unfortunately copyright restrictions meant it could not be uploaded at the above.  But I can send an author copy if you don't have a subscription to the journal.  Hope this helps.

Best wishes,

John

These papers may be useful:

Brooker, R.W., J.M.J. Travis, E. J. Clark, and C. Dytham (2007) Modelling species range shifts in a changing climate: The impacts of biotic interactions, dispersal distance and the rate of climate change. J. of Theoretical Biology 245:59-65

Pearson, R.G. and T.P. Dawson (2003) Predicting the impacts of climate change on the distribution of species: are bioclimate envelope models useful? Global Ecology & Biogeography 12:361-371

Williams, J.W. and S.T. Jackson (2007) Novel climates, no-analog communities, and ecological surprises. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 5:475-482.

Hannah, L., G. Midgley, I. Davies, F. Davis, L. Ries, W. Thuiller, J. Thorne, C. Seo, D. Stoms, and N. Snider. 2008. BioMove – Creation of a Complex and Dynamic Model for Assessing the Impacts of Climate Change on California Vegetation. PIER Energy-Related Environmental Research, California Energy Commission, Sacramento, CA

http://www.energy.ca.gov/2008publications/CEC-500-2008-060/CEC-500-2008-060.PDF