Abstract
The accelerating impact of climate change on giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) habitats have become an international research topic. Recently, many studies have also focused on medium-sized mountain ranges or entire giant panda habitats to predict how habitats will change as the climate warms, but few say in detail what to do or where to focus efforts. To fill this gap, this paper presents a new method to take comprehensive, fine-scale evaluations incorporating climate change, human disturbance, and current conservation networks and translate them into practical countermeasures in order to help decision-makers set priority regions for conservation. This study looked at the core area of the Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Natural Heritage site, namely Ya’an Prefecture, as a case study. The research employs the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) modeling algorithm to analyze how climate change will affect the habitats by 2050 under two scenarios: only considering the influence of climate change, and thinking about the coupled influence of climate change and human disturbance together. The results showed the following: (1) only considering climate change, the overall habitat that can be used by giant pandas in this region will increase, which differs from most of the previous results showing a decrease; (2) the new suitable habitat will shift westward, northward and eastward in this region; (3) conversely, the suitable habitat will be significantly reduced (about 58.56%) and fragmentized when taking into account human disturbance factors; (4) at present, the three small nature reserves are far from each other and cannot cover the present habitat well nor protect the potentially suitable habitats. Based on the comprehensive analysis of habitat shifts and our two field investigations, we suggest two regions that can be expanded into the conservation network to contain more potentially suitable habitats in the future. Furthermore, we used a geographical information system to incorporate high-resolution remote-sensing images from the GF-1 satellite, land-cover maps, and a digital elevation model (DEM) to verify the possibility of our two suggested regions.
Highlights
Rapid climate change is threatening global ecosystems and biodiversity by affecting certain species and the surrounding environments they depend on [1,2,3]
As for giant pandas, human disturbance is known to intensify the negative impacts of climate change through habitat loss and fragmentation [7]
We can conclude that the suitable area for giant pandas is increasing by about 33.54% and the low suitability area is decreasing by about 22.31%, and the increasing region is distributed in the north-west, north-east, and south-east of the study area
Summary
Rapid climate change is threatening global ecosystems and biodiversity by affecting certain species and the surrounding environments they depend on [1,2,3]. Climate change together with other stressors adversely affects habitats which, in turn, can lead to changes in species distribution, community composition, phenology and ecosystem functions [4,5], for species characterized by a limited habitat, small population, low reproductivity, and weak migration ability These species have poor tolerance to environmental changes and face the risk of extinction [6,7]. It has long been recognized that despite the slow and gradual climate variability, rapid climate changes might be expected, since the climate system is in an unstable equilibrium In this context, Varotsos et al (2014) found that the increase in sea-surface temperature over 30◦ S–60◦ N from 1900 to 2012 did not occur slowly and gradually, but abruptly in 1925/1926 and 1987/1988 with events time-separated by 62 years, i.e., an interval reminiscent of the well-established quasi 60-year natural cycle [21]. All these factors mean the giant panda faces severe challenges to its survival
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