Climate-induced spatial mismatch may intensify giant panda habitat loss and fragmentation

Abstract

Climate change may disrupt the spatial matching of interacting species, thus compromise the persistence of species. Giant pandas form specialized trophic interactions with bamboo, and empirical evidence indicated that climate in panda distribution range has warmed during the past half-century. A critical effort to reduce giant panda extinction risk is to measure the stability state of panda-bamboo and detect the trends of recent change. However, most studies projected what would happen only for a single component of the panda-bamboo system under future climate scenarios. Little has been known about whether climate warming has decoupled spatial matching between giant panda and bamboo. Here, we investigated the spatial matching between giant panda and bamboo, and explored the extent to which the panda thermally suitable habitats shifted and fragmented over the past half-century. We found that giant pandas gained 4750 km2 of thermally suitable areas. However, the thermally suitable habitat shrank by 8.2%, and the thermally suitable habitat patches became smaller and more exposed to the forest edge, resulting in 41.1% decline of metapopulation capacity, which indicated that giant pandas were facing high risks of habitat fragmentation. The protected thermally suitable habitat increased by 3.5 times from 1980 to 2010. In contrast to the habitat fragmentation outside nature reserves, the nature reserves have mitigated the habitat loss and fragmentation for giant pandas. Our findings suggested that conservation effort to reduce giant panda extinction risk should focus on maintaining spatial matching between panda and bamboo in the face of future climate change.