Species distribution modeling is an essential tool for conservation planning. These models utilize the species-environment relationship to formulate a spatial depiction of its distribution pattern. Often these models are developed aspatially. That is they do not consider the spatial context of the species occurrence. Thereby, ignoring spatial components that contribute to the species distribution pattern such as species endogenous processes and the species dependence on its spatially structured physical environment. Species distribution modeling methods have been developed that explicitly account for these spatial processes. Spatially explicit modeling methods are reviewed and the importance of carefully considering interactions between the ecological, data and statistical components of the model is highlighted. A comparative evaluation of five spatially explicit methods and an aspatial method was performed to investigate their relative abilities to accurately predict three songbird occurrences. Results were mixed and dependent on characteristics of the species ecology and model data.