Effects of models and spatial resolutions on the species distribution model performance

Species distribution models (SDMs) forecast the probability of species presence based on their statistical relationships with habitat parameters. Many studies have compared SDM models and their accuracies, but few have surveyed the effects of the different parameters on SDMs' performance. We tested the effects of spatial resolution and the model on SDMs' performance. Ten models were utilized to build SDMs across different spatial resolutions for Hyaena hyaena in Iran. Our results showed that SDM models indicated a firm response to spatial resolution. Our results also revealed that SDMs' performance strongly depended on the model and MaxEnt performed best across all spatial resolutions. This study indicated SDMs accuracy had not descending trend when spatial resolution raised, but all models showed a significant declining trend from 4 to 32 km.