The globally invasive small Indian mongoose Urva auropunctata is likely to spread with climate change

Vivien Louppe,Géraldine Veron,Anthony Herrel,Boris Leroy

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-64502-6

Abstract

Invasive alien species represent one of the major factors of global loss of biodiversity and disruption of natural ecosystems. The small Indian mongoose, Urva auropunctata, is considered one of the wild carnivore species with the greatest negative impact on global biodiversity. Understanding of the factors underpinning the species’ distribution and potential dispersion in a context of climate change thus appears crucial in the conservation of native ecosystems. Here we modelled the current and future climatically favourable areas for the small Indian mongoose using Ecological Niche Modelling based on data sets filtrated in environmental spaces. Projections from these models show extensive current favourable geographical areas, covering continental and insular regions within tropical and sub-tropical latitudes. Moreover, predictions for 2050 reveal that climate change is likely to expand current favourable areas north of the current favourable spaces, particularly in Eastern Europe. This climate-induced expansion is particularly worrisome given that the species is already spreading in the Balkan region. Our projections suggest that it is very likely that the small Indian mongoose will have an increasing influence on ecosystems and biodiversity in Europe by 2050.

Highlights

Invasive alien species represent one of the major factors of global loss of biodiversity and disruption of natural ecosystems
The small Indian mongoose, Urva auropunctata, is a small carnivore whose native distribution extends from Iraq to Myanmar, covering Iran, Pakistan, Northern India, Nepal and Bangladesh[8]
We modelled the bioclimatic niche of the small Indian mongoose based on five non-intercorrelated bioclimatic variables, and occurrences from both native and non-native range

Summary

Introduction

Invasive alien species represent one of the major factors of global loss of biodiversity and disruption of natural ecosystems. The use of ENMs in a growing number of studies has greatly contributed to their development, and highlighted various constraints and difficulties inherent to this technique[41,42,43,44] One of these difficulties lies in the fact that early approaches relied on the principle of niche conservatism, which assumes the retention of inherited niche-related ecological traits over time and space[45]. Bellard et al.[58] conclusions regarding the small Indian mongoose appear limited by sampling biases related to the absence of filtering of occurrence data Such sampling biases may alter the results by incorrectly assessing the significance of environmental variables in oversampled regions[63], resulting in overfitting of models[64] and artificial inflation of model accuracy in these areas[65,66]. Methods relying on filtering in the environmental space occupied by the species have recently demonstrated significant improvement of model performance[67,68], notably in the case of invasive species[69]

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion