Authors: Alley, Charlotte; Guilbault, Emy;Hayward, Matt;

Climate change is a major threat to small mammals in cold wet environments, particularly in alpine areas. The broad-toothed rat (BTR) (Mastacomys fuscus) is a small mammal found in alpine and sub-alpine areas of south-east Australia. We used a Point Process Model (PPM) to determine the impact of climate on the BTR using data from biodiversity atlas schemes. These atlases are often unreliable, so data cleaning is important. To determine the optimal data cleaning method, we employed three different methods, each of which produced a dataset that we used to run a separate PPM. In the first, we simply removed duplicates (n = 1455). In the second, we removed records that had a moderate chance of being unreliable (n = 1062). In the third, we removed records that had any chance of being unreliable (n = 574). The best fitting model, based on AIC and IMSE, was that conducted with the third dataset. Altitude, precipitation and temperature all had a significant impact on the BTR. This research exemplifies how species distribution modelling can be used to enhance our understanding of a species’ climatic niche.