ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Functional Plant Ecology
Data Fusion and Integrated Species Distribution Models for Three Endangered Ferns (Culcita macrocarpa, Diplazium caudatum, and Pteris incompleta) in a Mediterranean Biodiversity Hotspot
Provisionally accepted
- University of Malaga, Malaga, Spain
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Accurately modeling the distribution and abundance of rare and threatened species is critical for informing conservation strategies, particularly under increasing environmental pressures. This study applies Integrated Species Distribution Models (ISDMs) to estimate the spatiotemporal abundance of three threatened paleomediterranean relict ferns—Culcita macrocarpa, Diplazium caudatum, and Pteris incompleta—in Los Alcornocales Natural Park (southern Spain). These species are restricted to climatically stable microhabitats, making them especially vulnerable to environmental change. Using a joint-likelihood framework, we integrated structured abundance data (2014–2023) from the Andalusian Fern Recovery Plan with opportunistic presence-only records from GBIF. We tested 22 model configurations to assess the benefits of multi-species modeling and data-fusion strategies. The results show that modeling multiple species simultaneously improves predictive performance by capturing shared ecological and spatial structures. Spatiotemporal random effects had a stronger influence than fixed effects, reflecting the high degree of local-scale heterogeneity in fern distributions. The model excluding GBIF data fusion and relying solely on structured abundance data effectively captured joint spatiotemporal patterns among species. In contrast, the model incorporating data fusion showed signs of overfitting in species-specific components, not estimating appropriately shared components. The inclusion of GBIF records did not consistently improve predictive accuracy, mainly due to both the limited number of observations and inherent spatial biases from preferential sampling in accessible areas and known population sites, and produced more spatially constrained and smoothed distribution estimates. Population trends over the past decade indicate general demographic stability stable estimated abundance intensities, with localized abundance increases and limited declines, particularly in two populations of C. macrocarpa. These findings demonstrate the value of ISDMs in leveraging complementary data sources and ecological similarities to improve distribution modeling in rare species. This approach provides an effective framework for supporting conservation planning in biodiversity-rich but data-limited systems.
Keywords: endangered ferns, plant biogeography, Spatial Ecology, integrated speciesdistribution model, Bayesian hierarchical model, State-space model, DATA FUSION
Received: 19 Jun 2025; Accepted: 14 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ruiz-Valero, Pereña-Ortiz and Salvo-Tierra. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jaime Pereña-Ortiz, jperena@uma.es
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