Abstract
The Sino-Vietnamese border region is known for having unique and high levels of biodiversity. Global climate change is expected to alter the region’s climate and related changes in habitats and ecosystems will result in shifts in species’ distributions and increase the likelihood of local and global extinctions. Ecological Niche Models (ENMs) are widely used to predict the magnitude of potential species distribution shifts in response to climate change and inform conservation planning. Here, we present climate-based ENM projections of future climatically suitable habitat for the Daguo Mulian tree (Magnolia grandis), a critically endangered species of high ecological and cultural value in the Sino-Vietnamese border region. Projections of modeled climatically suitable habitat for M. grandis, both for the 2050s and 2070s, suggest significant habitat loss within conservation areas, and a defining shift in the location of suitable habitat. Future projections are conservative and do not account for dispersal limitations or species interactions or other factors, and thus may overestimate potential shifts and underestimate losses. Our results suggest that current conservation management efforts for M. grandis, which include community forest conservation monitoring combined with nursery cultivation efforts, can continue to have success if implemented in an adaptive management framework with long-term research and monitoring to inform forward-thinking decisions with future climatic suitability in mind. The results also underline how endangered species’ distributions may shift across borders as they track suitable climates, emphasizing that nations will need to cooperate to effectively manage threatened species and habitats and prevent extinctions.
Highlights
The Sino-Vietnamese border region has high levels of unique biodiversity as well as a diversity of human cultural groups (Sterling et al 2006)
To our knowledge, the first effort to characterize climatic niche space for M. grandis in the current climate and to estimate the potential impacts of global climate change on future climatically suitable habitat for this species
The variables that contributed to the optimal Ecological Niche Models (ENMs) were largely related to seasonality and the interactions of temperature and precipitation at extremes
Summary
The Sino-Vietnamese border region has high levels of unique biodiversity as well as a diversity of human cultural groups (Sterling et al 2006). Global climate change is expected to alter Southeast Asia’s climate considerably with a 3 ̊C rise in mean annual temperature, a 7% increase in wet season rainfall, and a drier dry season by the mid to late 21st century (Christensen and Hewitson 2007, Corlett 2009, Bickford et al 2010, IPCC 2013). These changes are likely to cause major shifts in biological communities and resources as novel climates appear and major biomes are redistributed (Parmesan and Yohe 2003, Corlett 2012). Some range shifts poleward and upward have already been observed (e.g. Chen et al 2011), the velocity of climate change is likely to outpace potential niche-tracking shifts in most geographies (e.g. Corlett and Westcott 2013)
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