For the study of the macroecology and conservation of Taiwan’s birds, there was an urgent need to develop
distribution models of bird species whose distribution had never before been modeled. Therefore, we here model the distributions of
27 mostly rare and cryptic breeding bird species using a statistical approach which has been shown to be especially reliable for
modeling species with a low sample size of presence localities, namely the maximum entropy (Maxent) modeling technique. For
this purpose, we began with a dedicated attempt to collate as much high-quality distributional data as possible, assembling databases
from several scientific reports, contacting individual data recorders and searching publicly accessible database, the internet and the
available literature. This effort resulted in 2022 grid cells of 1 × 1 km size being associated with a presence record for one of the 27
species. These records and 10 pre-selected environmental variables were then used to model each species’ probability distribution
which we show here with all grid cells below the lowest presence threshold being converted to zeros. We then in detail discuss the
interpretation and applicability of these distributions, whereby we pay close attention to habitat requirements, the intactness and
fragmentation of their habitat, the general detectability of the species and data reliability. This study is another one in an ongoing
series of studies which highlight the usefulness of using large electronic databases and modern analytical methods to help with the
monitoring and assessment of Taiwan’s bird species.