Land masses were not like today all the time. They changed with time, so if we extrapolate past distribution we have to map it in accordance past land-mass distribution. GPlate is one option but can we have other methods.
Ayan Mondal
Because determining actual species distributions is difficult, another approach is to predict species distributions by identifying key environmental (i.e., abiotic) characteristics of suitable species habitats and then using models that incorporate both information on known occurrences of a species and information on known occurrences of a species.
Take a look at the following tutorial as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWxOcGkewWQ
SH-GIS 2.0 at PaleoMap at http://www.scotese.com/
The link to the data is down but you can contact Chris from the website.
Dear Ayan,
You can use any kind of correlative species distribution models (e.g. GLM, GBM, MaxEnt, RF), train the model in the near current (e.g. 1971-2000) environmental conditions and then predict the past potential distribution (i.e., hindcast) with the trained model. For this, you'll need the same environmental predictors for the past and the near current time period. Past terrestial climate data can be downloaded from e.g. WorldClim 1.4 (Mid-Holocene, Last Glacial Maximum, Last Inter-glacial) or CHELSA-TraCE21k (100 years long transitional periods from 21ky BP).
HTH,
Ákos
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