Temporal transferability of marine distribution models in a multispecies context

Transferability of species distribution models is crucial for supporting biological conservation and management planning in the face of climate changes; however, there is a lack of understanding in how to achieve transference spatially and temporally, especially in a multispecies circumstance. This study evaluated the roles of model complexity and time scope in temporal transferability for multispecies distribution modelling. We collected data of multispecies distribution from a seven-year marine survey in coastal Yellow Sea, China, and used the data to evaluate the predictive performances of an array of multi-species distribution models (constrained linear ordination, constrained additive ordination, hierarchical models of species communities, multivariate random forests, multivariate tree boosting model, and multivariate artificial neural network), characterized by different structures, levels of complexity and time spans with 36 models and 50 scenarios. Our study showed that model transference was proper for some species but limited at the community level in general, and no specific modelling algorithm (regression models/machine-learning) or level of model complexity was found to be superior. Instead, model structure, features of target species, and time scope contributed substantially and influenced transferability in a contingent way. Temporal transferability tended to increase with the length of training periods and decay with the time gaps of prediction, whereas the magnitude varied among modelling algorithms. In addition, prolonging the time series of survey programs alone may have limited effectiveness on community-level transferability. This study contributes to the understanding of temporal transferability of multi-species distribution models and inform their applications in biological conservation and management from a temporal perspective.