Relative importance of climate, topography, and habitats for breeding wetland birds with different latitudinal distributions in the Czech Republic

• We assess the usefulness of easy obtainable data for modeling species distribution.
• We compared the importance of climate, habitat and topography for wetland birds.
• Birds are limited by climate or habitat depending on their latitudinal distribution.
• Models' performances are attributable to data characteristics.

Given species' vulnerability to climate change, land use change, and habitat loss, it is pertinent to examine how the distribution of a particular species is related to those factors. We assessed the use of climate, habitat, and topography data for modeling the distributions of 14 central European wetland birds, and compared the relative importance of these factors among bird groups with differing latitudinal distributions in Europe. We used the Third Atlas of Breeding Birds in the Czech Republic as a source of species distribution data. Variables were derived from Corine Land Cover, WorldClim, and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data. Hierarchical partitioning and multiple logistic models identified climatic, topographical, and habitat predictors as important determinants of distribution for each of the species under study. However, the relative contributions of particular variables differed among the species. Climatic, topographical, and habitat factor groups also differed in their importance to latitudinal species groups. Our results indicated that wetland birds with range margins close to the Czech Republic were potentially limited by two different factors: climate conditions impact the southerly distributed species and the availability of suitable habitat affects the northerly distributed species. The accuracy of the study models varied from fair to high (the area under curve values was 0.60–0.89) and revealed negative correlations with the relative occurrence area. In this study, we propose that any difference in model performance is more attributable to data characteristics than to a species' geographical characteristics.