Abstract
The millions of plant specimens that have been collected and stored in Chinese herbaria over the past ~110 years have recently been digitized and geo-referenced. Here we use this unique collection data set for species distribution modeling exercise aiming at mapping & explaining the botanical richness; delineating China’s phytogeographical regions and investigating the environmental drivers of the dissimilarity patterns. We modeled distributions of 6,828 woody plants using MaxEnt and remove the collection bias using null model. The continental China was divided into different phytogeographical regions based on the dissimilarity patterns. An ordination and Getis-Ord Gi* hotspot spatial statistics were used to analysis the environmental drivers of the dissimilarity patterns. We found that the annual precipitation and temperature stability were responsible for observed species diversity. The mechanisms causing dissimilarity pattern seems differ among biogeographical regions. The identified environmental drivers of the dissimilarity patterns for southeast, southwest, northwest and northeast are annual precipitation, topographic & temperature stability, water deficit and temperature instability, respectively. For effective conservation of China’s plant diversity, identifying the historical refuge and protection of high diversity areas in each of the identified floristic regions and their subdivisions will be essential.
Highlights
Regionalization studies were conducted by Wu13, who divided China into 4 major floristic regions, 7 sub-regions, 27 areas and 49 sub-areas
The available collection localities generally do not represent random samples from the available environmental gradients, with most collections coming from sites near roads, in protected areas, or areas of known high plant diversity or special species composition[16]
As a country famous for its extremely high species diversity, mapping the geographic patterns of species richness across China, and detecting the relationship between species richness and environments is critical to help conserve the biodiversity across the country
Summary
Regionalization studies were conducted by Wu13, who divided China into 4 major floristic regions, 7 sub-regions, 27 areas and 49 sub-areas. Former macro-scale studies were generally based on the raw survey data, which can give rise to several problems One of these is the geographical collection bias: Most regions of China have incomplete collection effort[14], termed ‘inventory incompleteness’ leading to incomplete information on actual ranges for many species[15]. For many regions in China, the original vegetation has disappeared and been replaced by agricultural crops, planted forests, or urbanization Current collections from these sites do no longer represent the actual potential species composition[17]. We aim to (1) use species distribution modeling to map and explain the spatial distribution of the woody plant diversity in mainland China; (2) use the obtained presence/absence data to delineate the phytogeographical regions of China and their relationships at genus and species level; (3) detect the effect of the uncorrelated environmental predictors on the dissimilarity patterns of species
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