Abstract
Fritillariae Cirrhosae Bulbus (FCB) is a famous traditional Chinese medicine, mainly used for relieving cough and resolving phlegm. According to Chinese Pharmacopoeia (2020), the medicine comes from dried bulbs of five species and one variety in Fritillaria. Due to climate change and human disturbance, the wild resources have become critically endangered in recent years. Following three climate change scenarios (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, and SSP5-8.5) under 2050s and 2070s, geographic information technology (GIS) and maximum entropy model (MaxEnt) were used to simulate the ecological suitability of FCB, a third-grade rare and endangered medicinal plant species. The results showed that the key environmental variables affecting the distribution of FCB were altitude, human activity intensity, and mean temperature of coldest quarter. Under current climate situation, the highly suitable areas were mainly located in the east of Qinghai Tibet Plateau, including Western Sichuan, southeastern Tibet, southern Gansu, Northwestern Yunnan, and Eastern Qinghai, with a total area of 31.47×104 km2, the area within the nature reserve was 7.13×104 km2, indicating that there was a large protection gap. Under the future climate change scenarios, the areas of the highly and poorly suitable areas of FCB showed a decreasing trend, while the areas of the moderately and total suitable areas showed an increasing trend. The geometric center of the total suitable area of the medicine will move to the northwest. The results could provide a strategic guidance for protection,development, and utilization of FCB though its prediction of potential distribution based on the key variables of climate change.
Highlights
With the change of global climate, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather increase significantly, which has a serious impact on agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and other industries (Calvin et al 2020)
The results showed that the altitude (52.6 %, q = 0.45) and the human activity intensity (29.2 %, q = 0.39) were the two most important variables determining the distribution of Fritillariae Cirrhosae Bulbus (FCB), which accounted for 90 % of the variations (Table 2)
The results of Jackknife test (Fig. 3) showed that when altitude, human activity intensity (HAI) and annual precipitation were used to model separately, their regularized training gain were significantly higher than other variables, which indicated that they contained unique information affecting the distribution of FCB
Summary
With the change of global climate, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather increase significantly, which has a serious impact on agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and other industries (Calvin et al 2020). As a special agricultural resource, the cultivation, growth and distribution of traditional Chinese medicine are affected by climate change. The change of traditional Chinese medicine resource producing areas caused by climate change will change the property of traditional Chinese medicine, and have a potential impact on the quality, clinical efficacy and medication safety of traditional Chinese medicine (Ma and Gao 2010). The genuine areas of traditional Chinese medicine are not fixed, and will expand, contract or migrate under the influence of climate change. Shen et al (2017) predicted that the increase of annual average temperature in the future will make the main distribution area of Gentiana rhodantha expand to higher altitude
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