To assess the effect of historical distribution shifts on 22 dominant tree species of the evergreen broad-leaved forests in Japan, we focused on the following two questions;1) how different is the occupancy of actual altitudinal and latitudinal distributions of each species in comparison to their potential habitats? 2) how does the empty habitat ranges determined by actual distribution and potential habitats relate to ecological traits?

We predicted potential habitats of each species under the current climate using generalized additive model. The presence/absence records of each species extracted from the database were used as a response variable, and four climatic variables were used as explanatory variables. We then compared the northern latitudinal limit and upper altitudinal limit in the actual distributions and potential habitats to determine the range filling rate.

We revealed that 12 target species had not reached the potential northern limits, while almost all the species had reached their potential altitudinal limits. As the results of meta analysis, the range filling rate on latitudinal gradients of generalist species were relatively higher than other those of target species. Our results suggested that mountainous topography was a limiting factor on postglacial northward shift of the species in Japan, and that it provided cryptic refugia during the LGM.