Past and future distributions of Southeast Asian murine rodents: the influence of climate changes

Our study, involving species distribution modelling techniques, aimed at assessing the influence of past and future climatic fluctuations on Southeast Asian small mammal distributions using two forest-dwelling (Leopoldamys herberti and Leopoldamys sabanus) and one karst endemic (Leopoldamys neilli) rodent species as models.
Our model predictions contradict the well-established hypothesis that Southeast Asian forest-dwelling species were confined to small refugia during the LGM. Moreover, these results suggest that the distribution of several East and Southeast Asian taxa were in their refugial state during Pleistocene interglacial periods rather than during glacial periods. This could be because of vegetation changes that may have occurred at that time as a result of the increased seasonality observed during the LIG. The two future climate change scenarios used in this study predicted that large climatically suitable areas would still be available in the future for the three species.