Abstract
Global climate change is one of the major threats to biodiversity. Global warming caused by the excess emission of greenhouse gases affects the distribution and physiology of species, and threatens their survival. Thus, predicting and evaluating the consequences of changing climates on species’ distributions is important for biodiversity conservation. The goal of our study was to assess the influence of future climate scenarios on the extent and geographic location of climatically suitable areas for Reeves’s pheasant Syrmaticus reevesii, a species endemic to China, using geographic information systems and ecological niche modeling techniques. We compared model prediction under present climate with the species’ historical range and land-cover data, both of which enable a plausible assessment of present-day climatically suitable areas for the species. The areas predicted suitable under future climates showed differences among emission scenarios, but several common trends emerged. Specifically, our results indicated that future climatically suitable area for S. reevesii would decrease and shift to higher altitudes, and the geographic centroids of the climatically suitable areas would mainly move northwest. Additionally, we assessed future changes of climatically suitable areas in the nature reserves where S. reevesii is known to occur, and provided suggestions for conserving the species under climate change scenarios.
Highlights
Species’ responses to global climate change have been one of the most investigated issues in the field of ecology in recent years (Walther et al 2002, Thomas et al 2004, Peterson et al 2008b)
After masking out the outlier cells, about 13% of projection grid cells were predicted as climatically suitable areas (CSAs) under present climatic conditions, mostly located in central and north-central China (Fig. 1)
Our models showed that the present CSA covered most of the current and extinct distribution of Syrmaticus reevesii
Summary
Species’ responses to global climate change have been one of the most investigated issues in the field of ecology in recent years (Walther et al 2002, Thomas et al 2004, Peterson et al 2008b). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global climate is getting warmer, and extreme weather events (droughts, floods, storms, and heat waves) are becoming more frequent (Solomon et al 2007). Climate change can affect species’ habitats by altering abiotic factors, which in turn affect biotic interactions and distribution patterns of species (Walther et al 2002). Climate models simulate the interaction between the atmosphere, ocean, land surface, and ice in 3-dimensional grids, and future climate variables are computed according to the interaction between factors in each grid, such as wind, heat transmission, radiation, and relative humidity (Easterling et al 1997). The most frequently used climate models are coupled atmosphere−ocean Global Circulation Models (GCMs), recognized as effective tools for simulating the influence of increasing greenhouse gases on global climate (Solomon et al 2007)
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