Appendix A. Methods for creating current-observed, current-
predicted, and future-predicted species distribution models for
whitebark pine within British Columbia, Canada. In 2006, species
distribution models for whitebark pine within British Columbia
were created by Tongli Wang (University of British Columbia,
unpublished) using the climate-envelope modeling technique of
Hamann and Wang (2006). The current-observed range for whitebark
pine was determined using 479 presence observations from the
botanical inventory used to create the BC Ministry of Forests
and Range’s Biogeoclimatic Ecological Classification (BEC)
system (Fig. 1a). The BEC system is a hierarchical
classification system that divides BC’s landbase into 14 zones,
97 subzones and 152 variants based on vegetation, soil, climate
and topography (Meidinger and Pojar, 1991). The variant level
describes land units comprising relatively homogeneous
ecological and geoclimatic features. To create current-observed
species ranges, Hamann and Wang (2006) extr