This guidebook is intended to provide a practical overview of climate envelope modeling for conservation
professionals and natural resource managers. The material is intended for people with little background or
experience in climate envelope modeling who want to better understand and interpret models developed by
others and the results generated by such models, or want to do some modeling themselves. This is not an
exhaustive review of climate envelope modeling, but rather a brief introduction to some key concepts in the
discipline. Readers interested in a more in-depth treatment of much of the material presented here are referred
to an excellent book, Mapping Species Distributions: Spatial Inference and Prediction by Janet Franklin. Also, a
recent review (Araújo & Peterson 2012) provides an excellent, though more technical, discussion of many of the
issues dealt with here. Here we treat selected topics from a practical perspective, using minimal jargon to explain
and illustrate some of the many issues that one has to be aware of when using climate envelope models. When
we do introduce specialized terminology in the guidebook, we bold the term when it is first used; a glossary of
these terms is included at the back of the guidebook.
