Determination of Suitable Regions for Cultivation of Three Medicinal Plants under a Changing Climate

Abstract

The use of less vulnerable species to climate change such as medicinal plants can be considered as a coping strategy for adapting to climate change. This paper aims to evaluate the suitability of the arable lands located in the Daryache-Namak basin, Iran, for cultivation of several medicinal plants. An approach based on the fuzzy logic was developed that considers potential changes in suitability caused by both climate anomalies and new policies regarding the conflicting water demand. This approach uses different factors, including climate, water availability, soil texture, and salinity to classify the suitability. Monthly outputs of regional climate simulations conducted under the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) program were applied to project the future climate. The results showed that climate anomalies and new policies have led to shifts in the spatial distribution of medicinal plants. For instance, the area of highly suitable lands for cultivating medicinal plants was decreased by 10%. Furthermore, the suitability score of the proposed approach had the largest determination coefficient for yield estimations, mainly due to accounting explicitly for various environmental factors. Based on the field survey, it is revealed that the potentially suitable cultivation regions are highly coincident with the existing cultivated locations. Comparing the different polygons indicated that for marginally and not suitable classes, the contribution of maximum and minimum temperature was increased and decreased, respectively. Similarly, in these two classes, the contribution of water availability would increase.