Assessing Species Vulnerability to Climate Change in Tropical Asia: Implications for Biodiversity Conservation and Forest Management

Abstract

Global climate change is significantly altering the large scale distributions of plants and animals.The Earth has warmed by 0.7°C during the last century. The consequences are already apparent in forest ecosystems as species are responding to the changing climate with shifts in their phenology and geographic distributions. The potential for large increases in global mean temperatures (e.g., 4.3 ± 0.7°C) by 2100 has significant implications for forest species and ecosystems. Under these varying climatic conditions, some species may go extinct either locally or regionally, with climate change acting synergistically with other extinction drivers. Tropical Asian forests contain several biodiversity hotspots and species-rich ecoregions. Our understanding of species' and forest ecosystems' vulnerability to global climate change in this region is limited. Addressing this problem is a critical task for current tropical Asian ecological research. iii I developed habitat suitability models for the four large threatened mammals (Asiatic black bear, Asian elephant, Western hoolock gibbon and Bengal tiger), across their entire distributions in Asia.The results suggest that changes in annual precipitation, annual mean temperature, precipitation and temperature seasonality, and land use/land cover change could reduce suitable habitat for these large mammals and therefore increase their extinction risks. It can be concluded that increasing climate stress on tropical forests could lead to greater extinction risks of these threatened large mammals.The findings of this thesis provide a fundamental basis for further studies of climate change impacts on species distribution in tropical Asia, and highlight the conservation importance of the plant and animal species in the region. The modelling outputs can be used to categorize the natural habitats of Sal, Garjan and Teak as low to high risk under changing climates to inform conservation planning and forest management. Given the conservation importance of the threatened large mammals for maintaining a healthy forest ecosystem, the findings of the models can be used to categorize the likely suitable habitats under changing climates and preparing proper guidelines to reduce their extinction risks. To ensure wider applicability to conservation planning for species vulnerable to global climate change, the methods and analyses presented here for tropical Asia could be applied to other tropical regions (i.e., in Africa and the Americas), using different species groups and forest types.iv

Predicting the potential distribution change of the endangered Francois' langur (Trachypithecus francoisi) across its entire range in China under climate change

“…Previous studies have indicated habitat loss and fragmentation from encroachment for settlements and farming were the principal threats to primates (Chetry et al., 2021 ). Climate change and land use/cover change could reduce suitable habitats for primates and increase their extinction risk (Carvalho et al., 2019 ; Deb, 2016 ). Fernández et al.…”

Predicting the potential distribution change of the endangered Francois’ langur (Trachypithecus francoisi) across its entire range in China under climate change

“…The centroid of habitat shifted to the southeast at a rate of approximately 2.84km/year from current to 2100. Previous studies have indicated that changes in annual precipitation, annual mean temperature, precipitation and temperature seasonality, as well as land use/ land cover changes, could reduce suitable habitat for the large mammals such as Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus ), Asian elephant (Elephas maximus ) and western hoolock gibbon (Hoolock hoolock ), and thus increase their extinction risk (Deb, 2016). In addition, our results are consistent with the description that primates and other large mammals are highly dependent on a complete forest ecosystem for their food and security requirements, and habitat fragmentation will accelerate local population extinctions (Guan et al, 2022).…”

Diatoms as Indicator Tool for Climate and Environmental Changes and Research Imperatives for Tropical Asia

“…Climate change and its impact will vary among the region and countries although it is recognised as a global phenomenon [14]. Climate change studies in Tropical Asia are much deficient [15]. Diatom-based climate change studies are very scant in the tropical area.…”