The South Asian monsoon maintains the disjunction of Rumex hastatus between the western Himalayas and the Hengduan Mountains, southwest China

Abstract

The Himalayas and the Hengduan Mountains of southwest China are hotspots of both climatic and species diversity. Yet, the distribution patterns of semi‐arid plant communities that have arisen throughout the region's complex uplift history remain insufficiently understood. In particular, the striking disjunctions of plants associated with dry river valleys that solely occur on the eastern and western ends of the Himalayan arc, but are absent in between, lack a sound explanation. Here we aim to disentangle the more recent environmental drivers behind the disjunction of the semi‐woody shrub Rumex hastatus found in dry river valleys of the western Himalayas and the Hengduan Mountains. We used ecological niche modeling and enhanced random forest parameterizations (down‐sampling) to infer suitable and unsuitable habitats within the study area during the last glacial maximum, under present climate conditions, and under four future climate scenarios. Annual and seasonal precipitation contributed the strongest to the discrimination between occurrences and the distribution gap, with the latter showing much higher rainfall amounts. The gap was also characterized by low overall habitat suitability, whereas occurrence probabilities in dry river valleys inhabited by R. hastatus were very high. However, some suitable but isolated habitats within the gap were detected in Bhutan and the southeastern Tibetan Plateau. The identified distribution gap was consistent in all simulated scenarios from the last glacial maximum to the near future. Our results suggest that the South Asian summer monsoon system acts as a persistent ecological barrier maintaining the disjunct distribution of dry river valley‐dwelling plants in the western Himalayas and the Hengduan Mountains.