Abstract
Rapidly changing climate is likely to modify the spatial distribution of both flora and fauna. Land use change continues to alter the availability and quality of habitat and further intensifies the effects of climate change on wildlife species. We used an ensemble modeling approach to predict changes in habitat suitability for an iconic wildlife species, greater one‐horned rhinoceros due to the combined effects of climate and land use changes. We compiled an extensive database on current rhinoceros distribution and selected nine ecologically meaningful environmental variables for developing ensemble models of habitat suitability using ten different species distribution modeling algorithms in the BIOMOD2 R package; and we did this under current climatic conditions and then projected them onto two possible climate change scenarios (SSP1‐2.6 and SSP5‐8.5) and two different time frames (2050 and 2070). Out of ten algorithms, random forest performed the best, and five environmental variables—distance from grasslands, mean temperature of driest quarter, distance from wetlands, annual precipitation, and slope, contributed the most in the model. The ensemble model estimated the current suitable habitat of rhinoceros to be 2610 km2, about 1.77% of the total area of Nepal. The future habitat suitability under the lowest and highest emission scenarios was estimated to be: (1) 2325 and 1904 km2 in 2050; and (2) 2287 and 1686 km2 in 2070, respectively. Our results suggest that over one‐third of the current rhinoceros habitat would become unsuitable within a period of 50 years, with the predicted declines being influenced to a greater degree by climatic changes than land use changes. We have recommended several measures to moderate these impacts, including relocation of the proposed Nijgad International Airport given that a considerable portion of potential rhinoceros habitat will be lost if the airport is constructed on the currently proposed site.
Highlights
Climate plays an important role in determining the distribution of species over space and time, and the species thrive only in a particular environment because they are adapted to a certain climatic condition in their geographical range (Araújo & Pearson, 2005; Choudhury et al, 2016)
The geographical range of the rhinoceros in the past mainly declined due to habitat loss associated with anthropogenic land use changes (Ellis & Talukdar, 2019; Rookmaaker et al, 2016), but our study indicates that future land use change is likely to contribute less to habitat loss than climate change (Appendix S11)
Our results indicate that the rhinoceros population in Nepal is likely to experience a moderate level of vulnerability to climate change given the predicted loss in suitable habitat under highest
Summary
Climate plays an important role in determining the distribution of species over space and time, and the species thrive only in a particular environment because they are adapted to a certain climatic condition in their geographical range (Araújo & Pearson, 2005; Choudhury et al, 2016). The predictive performance of modeling techniques differs, and the uncertainty of predictions could be substantially reduced by using consensus methods (Marmion et al, 2009) These ensemble techniques of SDM systematically evaluate the species distribution models and its potential variations under future climate change, and BIOMOD serves as a suitable platform to such modeling (Thuiller et al, 2009). Our study identified current suitable habitat for rhinoceros and predicted future habitat for all of Nepal under two different climate and land use change scenarios using bioclimatic, topographic, habitat, and anthropogenic data as predictor variables
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