Abstract
Understanding how species have adapted and responded to past climate provides insights into the present geographical distribution and may improve predictions of how biotic communities will respond to future climate change. Therefore, estimating the distribution and potentially suitable habitats is essential for conserving sensitive species such as Garuga forrestii W.W.Sm., a tree species endemic to China. The potential climatic zones of G. forrestii were modelled in MaxEnt software using 24 geographic points and nine environmental variables for the current and future (2050 and 2070) conditions under two climate representative concentration pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) scenarios. The resulting ecological niche models (ENMs) demonstrated adequate internal assessment metrics, with all AUC and TSS values being >0.79 and a pROC of >1.534. Our results also showed that the distribution of G. forrestii was primarily influenced by temperature seasonality (% contribution = 12%), elevation (% contribution = 27.5%), and precipitation of the wettest month (% contribution = 35.6%). Our findings also indicated that G. forrestii might occupy an area of 309,516.2 km2 in southwestern China. We note that the species has a potential distribution in three provinces, including Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guangxi. A significant decline in species range is observed under the future worst case of high-emissions scenario (RCP8.5), with about 19.5% and 20% in 2050 and 2070, respectively. Similarly, higher elevations shift northward to southern parts of Sichuan province in 2050 and 2070. Thus, this study helps highlight the vulnerability of the species, response to future climate and provides an insight to assess habitat suitability for conservation management.
Highlights
Biodiversity loss has been attributed to important factors such as anthropogenic activities, natural ecological disaster events, the spread of invasive species and climate change [1,2]
This study shows that ecological niche models (ENMs) are reliable tools to investigate and understand the factors influencing the potential distribution of species across levels [57,58]
Our study predicted the potential distribution of G. forrestii for the current and future
Summary
Biodiversity loss has been attributed to important factors such as anthropogenic activities (e.g., overexploitation and over-utilization), natural ecological disaster events, the spread of invasive species and climate change [1,2]. For future climate scenarios, one can use the essential environmental variables of the species to make spatial predictions about the potential distributions under changing conditions [15]. ENMs are applicable to a wide range of levels of biological entities (species, both aquatic and terrestrial) at different geographic scales [16,17]. They have been used widely by evolutionary biologists in phylogeographic studies [18], conservationists in conservation biology [19], and ecologists in hypotheses testing about species [20]
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