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A modelling framework for studying the combined effects of climate and land‐cover changes on the distribution of species is presented. The model integrates land‐cover data into a correlative bioclimatic model in a scale‐dependent hierarchical manner, whereby Artificial Neural Networks are used to characterise species’ climatic requirements at the European scale and land‐cover requirements at the British scale. The model has been tested against an alternative non‐hierarchical approach and has been applied to four plant species in Britain: Rhynchospora alba, Erica tetralix, Salix herbacea and Geranium sylvaticum. Predictive performance has been evaluated using Cohen's Kappa statistic and the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve, and a novel approach to identifying thresholds of occurrence which utilises three levels of confidence has been applied. Results demonstrate reasonable to …