How do steppe plants follow their optimal environmental conditions or persist under suboptimal conditions? The differing strategies of annuals and perennials.

For a species to be able to respond to environmental change, it must either succeed in following its optimal environmental conditions or in persisting under suboptimal conditions, but we know very little about what controls these capacities. We parameterized species distribution models (SDMs) for 135 plant species from the Algerian steppes. We interpreted low false-positive rates as reflecting a high capacity to follow optimal environmental conditions and high false-negative rates as a high capacity to persist under suboptimal environmental conditions.