Differential Impacts of Climatic and Land Use Changes on Habitat Suitability and Protected Area Adequacy across the Asian Elephant’s Range

Abstract

Climate change and human activities have caused dramatic impacts on biodiversity. Although a number of international agreements or initiatives have been launched to mitigate the biodiversity loss, the erosion of terrestrial biome habitats is inevitable. Consequently, the identification of potential suitable habitats under climate change and human disturbance has become an urgent task of biodiversity conservation. In this study, we used the maximum entropy model (MaxEnt) to identify the current and potential future habitats of Asian elephants in South and Southeast Asia. We performed analyses for future projections with 17 scenarios using the present results as baseline. To optimize the modelling results, we delineated the core habitats by using the Core Mapper Tool and compared them with existing protected areas (PAs) through gap analysis. The results showed that the current total area of core habitats is 491,455 km2 in size and will be reduced to 332,544 km2 by 2090 under SSP585 (the shared socioeconomic pathway). The projection analysis under differential scenarios suggested that most of the core habitats in the current protected areas would remain stable and suitable for elephants in the future. However, the remaining 75.17% of the core habitats lay outside the current PAs, and finally we mapped approximately 219,545 km2 of suitable habitats as priority protected areas in the future. Although our model did not perform well in some regions, our analyses and findings still could provide useful references to the planning of protected areas and conservation of Asian elephant.

Prediction of potential distributions of Morina kokonorica and Morina chinensis in China

“…Based on the simulation results from the three past periods, it can be observed that both M. kokonorica and M. chinensis have exhibited trends of not only northward migration to higher latitude but also westward migration along the Himalayas to higher elevations. This observation is consistent with the findings of most studies on suitable habitats (Anand et al., 2021 ; Yan et al., 2021 ; Yang et al., 2022 ). Comparing the simulation results of potentially suitable areas between the current and future periods, there was little change in total suitable areas for M. kokonorica .…”

A Phased Approach to Increase Human Tolerance in Elephant Corridors to Link Protected Areas in Southern Mozambique

“…We show that both the GLTFCA and LTFCA have been linked by trailblazing bulls with this connectivity involving two South African national parks (KNP and Tembe Elephant Park) and five PAs within Eswatini (Big Bend Conservancy, Hlane Royal National Park, Mkhaya Game Reserve, Mlawula Nature Reserve and Panata Ranch) over an international border and across three political borders (South Africa, Eswatini and Mozambique). The next step will be to model the occurrence of elephant locations versus suitable habitat (see [70]). This is being carried out in a follow up study (Bedetti et al in prep.…”

Projecting Bioclimatic Change over the South-Eastern European Agricultural and Natural Areas via Ultrahigh-Resolution Analysis of the de Martonne Index

“…Moreover, the geopolitical situation since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war further hinders joint action on climate change issues [79]. Although both scenarios involve high greenhouse gas emissions, they provide a basis for studying the impacts of climate change on agriculture and the natural environment [76,[80][81][82][83][84]. The time frames involve the 1981-2010 reference period and the 2011-2040, 2041-2070 and 2071-2100 periods designated, respectively, as Ref, p1, p2 and p3.…”