Identifying where and how anthropogenic drivers affect biodiversity is essential for effective conservation and restoration planning. Drivers impact mapping is an important tool to achieve this goal. Species select habitats with attributes that support key ecological functions, such as reproduction, foraging, and refuge; collectively referred to as habitat requirements . Traditional risk mapping often focuses solely on mapping drivers, overlooking species-specific ecological responses mediated through impacts on these habitat requirements. Building on the understanding that species’ sensitivity to drivers is strongly influenced by the availability of their habitat requirements, we present a novel framework that integrates habitat requirements availability into assessments of driver impacts on species distributions. We compared three methodological approaches: a classical model based on standalone drivers’ intensity, a statistical species-driver approach and specific habitat-driver interaction approach incorporating interactions between habitat requirement availability and drivers from a heuristic perspective. These approaches were applied to seven bird species associated with open habitats in Catalonia (NE Spain) and validated against observed distributional changes from two breeding bird atlases spanning a 15-year interval. Our results show that the interaction-based approach improves the understanding of spatial patterns changes of species distribution shifts. Although the magnitude of this improvement depends on the validation framework. Under AUC-based pairwise comparisons, where colonisations and extinctions are evaluated separately, the advantage is modest and context-dependent. In contrast, the Temporal Validation framework reveals a clearer and more consistent improvement, particularly in capturing the ecological consistency between impact gradients and observed changes. These findings highlight the importance of integrating interactions between environmental drivers and species’ habitat requirements into impact mapping, providing robust support for impact attribution and for informing conservation and restoration actions.
Pla et al. (Fri,) studied this question.