Pineapples grow best in hot environments, and wheat grows better in cold steppes; saguaro cacti live in deserts, and Venus fly-traps live in nutrient-poor wetlands. We all have very reasonable intuitive ideas of what organisms can be found in what environments, that are often borne out by careful observations. Alexander von Humboldt was one of…

Understanding where species occur is a major challenge in biogeography, and of applied interest for forecasting species responses to climate change. How to best make these species distribution models has been a central discussion in recent decades. The idea underlying many models is Hutchinson’s n-dimensional hypervolume concept, but many models now in use do not…