Current and future climatic regions favourable for a globally introduced wild carnivore, the raccoon Procyon lotor

Vivien Louppe,Boris Leroy,Anthony Herrel,Géraldine Veron

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-45713-y

Abstract

Invasive species are considered as one of the major threats to biodiversity and represent a major challenge in the conservation of natural ecosystems, in preventing damage to agricultural production, and human health risks. Environmental Niche Modelling has emerged as a powerful tool to predict the patterns of range expansion of non-native species and to direct effective strategies for managing biological invasions. The raccoon, Procyon lotor, is a wild mesocarnivore presenting a high adaptability and showing successful introduced populations worldwide. Here, we modelled the current and future climatically favourable areas for the raccoon using two protocols, based on data sets filtrated in geographic and environmental spaces. Projections from these models show extensive current favourable geographical areas covering extensive regions of temperate biomes. Moreover, predictions for 2050 reveals extensive new favourable areas north of the current favourable regions. However, the results of the two modeling approaches differ in the extent of predicted favourable spaces. Protocols using geographically filtered data present more conservative forecasts, while protocol using environmental filtration presents forecasts across greater areas. Given the biological characteristics and the ecological requirements of a generalist carnivore such as the raccoon, the latter forecasts appears more relevant and should be privileged in the development of conservation plans for ecosystems.

Highlights

The comprehension of the relationships between organisms and their environment, and an understanding of the dynamics of species distributions is crucial to be able to predict species responses to the current environmental crisis
While some issues lie in the quality of the data, major difficulties arise from methodological limitations, such as the selection of the spatial framework of study, model-based variations and uncertainty, or the choice of methods for model evaluation[68,69,70,71,72,73]
This study presents the most complete analysis of the bioclimatic envelope favourable to the presence of the globally introduced carnivore Procyon lotor, and the first forecast of areas favourable to the species at a global scale using multiple modelling techniques and methods

Summary

Introduction

The comprehension of the relationships between organisms and their environment, and an understanding of the dynamics of species distributions is crucial to be able to predict species responses to the current environmental crisis. The raccoon is a carnivore native to the North American continent This species has been moved to different areas through the pet trade and for commercial purposes (exploitation of its fur). These pseudo-absences are randomly generated over the entire available environmental space[74] This method presents a risk of generating false absences, largely impacting model performance and the identification of favourable areas[75]. Methods relying on the identification of the environmental space occupied by the species, in order to generate pseudo-absences in the unoccupied environmental space, have demonstrated significant improvement of model performance[80]

Methods

Results

Conclusion