Stefano Mammola , Julien Pétillon, Axel Hacala, Sapho-Lou Marti, Jérémy Monsimet, Pedro Cardoso, Denis Lafage

Species distribution models (SDMs) are emerging as essential tools in the equipment of many ecologists; they are useful in exploring species distributions in space and time and in answering an assortment of questions related to historical biogeography, climate change biology and conservation biology. Given that arthropod distributions are strongly influenced by microclimatic conditions and microhabitat structure, they should be an ideal candidate group for SDM research, especially generalist predators because they are not directly dependent on vegetation or prey types. However, most SDM studies of animals to date have focused either on broad samples of vertebrates or on arthropod species that are charismatic (e.g. butterflies) or economically important (e.g. vectors of disease, crop pests and pollinators). By means of a systematic bibliometric approach, we targeted the literature published on key terrestrial arthropod predators (ants, ground beetles and spiders), chosen as a model to explore challenges and opportunities of species distribution modelling in mega-diverse arthropod groups. We show that the use of SDMs to map the geography of terrestrial arthropod predators has been a recent phenomenon, with a near-exponential growth in the number of studies over the past 10 years and still limited collaborative networks among researchers. There is a bias in studies towards charismatic species and geographical areas that hold lower levels of diversity but greater availability of data, such as Europe and North America. To overcome some of these data limitations, we illustrate the potential of modern data sources (citizen science programmes, online databases) and new modelling approaches (ensemble of small models, modelling above the species level). Finally, we discuss areas of research where SDMs may be combined with dispersal models and increasingly available phylogenetic and functional data to obtain mechanistic descriptions of species distributions and their spatio-temporal shifts within a global change perspective.