Comparing Suitable Habitat Models to Predict Rare and Endemic Plant Species Distributions: What are the Limits of the Niche of Cola lorougnonis (Malvaceae) in Cote d'Ivoire?

Abstract

Cola lorougnonis is an endemic, rare, and treated species. It was recently recorded in Dékpa forest near Agbaou (a village of Divo region, Côte d'Ivoire). In the same forest, 20 other rare and endemic plant species were recorded. Accurate modeling of geographical distributions of these species is crucial to various applications in ecology and biodiversity conservation. The present study analyzed suitable habitat models for the 21 species. The main objective was to test geographical predictions for the focused species: Cola lorougnonis. We used Maxent modelling method for predicting potential suitable habitats combining environmental variables and species records. We evaluated Maxent predictions using the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve (AUC). For each species, the map of distribution was engineered using DIVA-GIS. We compared the suitable habitat areas among species. Principal Canonical Analysis allowed the ordination of species according to environmental variables. AUC values allowed to get 11 species with excellent distribution models, 8 species with good distribution models, and 2 species with predictive models considered as acceptable. Cola lorougnonis (AUC = 0.99) and Drypetes singroboensis (AUC = 0.96) have the same focused area: moist semi-deciduous forest in Côte d'Ivoire. They are more sensitive to changes in rainfall of both warmest and coldest seasons. The State of Côte d'Ivoire has to undertake monitoring, assessment and reporting of conservation status facilitation for all habitats where these species could be found within the territory. Additional studies focusing on the investigation areas and niche models onto future conditions of climate could be considered.

An integrating study of genetic diversity and ecological niche modelling in Salvia aristata (Lamiaceae)

“…We generated ENMs for putative taxa in S. aristata using the maximum entropy algorithm implemented in Maxent v.3.3 (Phillips et al 2006). Previous studies showed that Maxent performs well in comparison to other methods for relatively small occurrence record sample sizes (Baldwin 2009, Vroh et al 2016, an important property for modelling narrow endemics. To generate models, we used 75% of occurrence point for testing and 25% for training with 5,000 iterations.…”

Species Structure, Diversity, and Tree Regeneration on Stumps in Second-Growth Temperate Rainforests of British Columbia, Canada

“…All analyses were conducted in R 3.3.1 (R Development Core Team 2014). To further evaluate the species relationship on stumps, we used the variance ratio (VR) (Vroh et al 2016), which indicates that the total species relationship and total species association will be positively and negatively associated when VR > 1 and VR < 1, respectively. We measured the strength of the linear association between species pairs growing on stumps by using the Pearson product-moment correlation coe cient (Sedgwick 2012).…”

Assessing the Relevance of Herbarium Collections as Tools for Conservation Biology

“…In this sense, studies on invasive plants (e.g., Giljohann et al, 2011;Tererai & Wood, 2014;Fernández & Hamilton, 2015;Wang et al, 2016a) allow to identify their potential areas of occupation and therefore focus on their control. On another hand, studies on rare plants (e.g., Williams et al, 2009;Marcer et al, 2013;McCune, 2016;Vroh et al, 2016;Tang et al, 2017) or threatened plants (e.g., Adhikari et al, 2012;Aguirre-Gutiérrez et al, 2015;Hassemer et al, 2016;Sántiz et al, 2016) facilitate to identify and predict the most suitable habitats for these species, determine their degree of protection linked to protected areas networks, and even to design possible reintroductions. Finally, habitat studies (e.g., Feeley, 2012; Amici et al, 2014) allow to evaluate potential distribution changes of species and to devote efforts in their mitigation.…”