Effective conservation capable of mitigating global biodiversity declines require thorough knowledge on species distributions and their drivers. A species ecological niche determines its geographic distribution, and species distribution models (SDMs) can be used to predict them. For various reasons, e.g. the lack of spatial data on relevant environmental factors, SDMs fail to characterize important ecological relationships. We argue that SDMs do not yet include relevant environmental information, which can be measured with remote sensing (RS).