Black-headed (Emberiza melanocephala) and Red-headed (Emberiza bruniceps) buntings known to hybridize southeast of Caspian Sea. Two species also come to close in northern Caspian Sea and eastern Iran but there is not any report of their contact in these regions. Species distribution models (SDMs) were constructed for both species to test whether climatic variables are suitable in these zones to predict probably hybridization. This type of modeling allows estimating the size of the suitable area not colonized by a species. For the modeling, at first, georeferenced locality data were combined with current digital maps of climate variables with a 150 arc-second resolution grid extracted from the Worldclim data base. Variables with pairwise Pearson correlation coefficients r ≤ 0.70 were selected for modeling. The models were run with nine temperature and precipitation variables. Performance of the models was assessed by means of the area under the curve (AUC) across the 10 replicates. Results confirmed three contact zones for the two species in the Palearctic region but extensive hybridization is highly predictable only for their contact zone in northern Iran and climatic variables apparently were limited overlapping range in northern Caspian Sea and eastern Iran, however, according to predicted models a narrow contact zone are possible in future.

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