Anouschka R. Hof ^1* Marco Mina ² Paola Mairota ³ Francisco Aguilar ⁴ Georg Leitinger ⁵ Josef Brůna ⁶ Matti Koivula ⁷ Matija Klopčič ⁸ Jörgen Sjögren ⁹ Giorgio Vacchiano ¹⁰

• ¹ Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, Netherlands
• ² Institute for Alpine Environment, Eurac Research, Bozen/Bolzano, Italy, Bozen, Italy
• ³ Department of Soil Sciences, Plants and Food, University of Bari Aldo Moro, via G. Amendola 165/A, 70126, Bari, Italy
• ⁴ Department of Forestry and Wildlife Management, Faculty of Applied Ecology, Agricultural Sciences and Biotechnology, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Evenstad, Norway
• ⁵ Institute of Ecology, Faculty of Biology, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
• ⁶ Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Průhonice, Czechia
• ⁷ Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), Helsinki, Uusimaa, Finland
• ⁸ Department of Forestry and Renewable Forest Resources, Faculty of Biotechnical, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
• ⁹ Department of Wildlife, Fish and Environment, Faculty of Forest Sciences, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå, Västerbotten, Sweden
• ¹⁰ DEPT. AGRICULTURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

Climate change significantly alters species distributions. Numerous studies project the future distribution of species using Species Distribution models (SDMs), most often using coarse resolutions. Working at coarse resolutions in forest ecosystems fails to capture landscape-level dynamics, spatially explicit processes, and temporally defined events that act at finer resolutions and that can disproportionately affect future outcomes. Dynamic Forest Landscape Models (FLMs) can simulate the survival, growth, and mortality of (stands of) trees over long time periods at small resolutions. However, as they are able to simulate at fine resolutions, study landscapes remain relatively small due to computational constraints. The large amount of feedbacks between biodiversity, forest, and ecosystem, processes cannot completely be captured by FLMs or SDMs alone. Integrating SDMs with FLMs enables a more detailed understanding of the impact of perturbations on forest landscapes and their biodiversity. Several studies have taken this approach at landscape scales, using fine resolutions. Yet, many scientific questions in the fields of biogeography, macroecology, conservation management, among others, require a focus on both large scales and fine resolutions. Here, drawn from literature and experience, we provide our perspective on the most important challenges that need to be overcome to use integrated frameworks at spatial scales larger than the landscape and at fine resolutions. Future research should prioritize these challenges to better understand drivers of species distributions in forest ecosystems and effectively design conservation strategies under the influence of changing climates on spatially and temporally explicit processes. We further discuss possibilities to address these challenges.