Forecasting the combined effects of future climate and land use change on the suitable habitat of Davidia involucrata Baill

Abstract

Accurately predicting the future distribution of species is crucial for understanding how species will response to global environmental change and for evaluating the effectiveness of current protected areas (PAs). Here, we assessed the effect of climate and land use change on the projected suitable habitats of Davidia involucrata Baill under different future scenarios using the following two types of models: (a) only climate covariates (climate SDMs) and (b) climate and land use covariates (full SDMs). We found that full SDMs perform significantly better than climate SDMs in terms of both AUC ( p < .001) and TSS ( p < .001) and also projected more suitable habitat than climate SDMs both in the whole study area and in its current suitable range, although D. involucrate is predicted to loss at least 26.96% of its suitable area under all future scenarios. Similarly, we found that these range contractions projected by climate SDMs would negate the effectiveness of current PAs to a greater extent relative to full SDMs. These results suggest that although D. involucrate is extremely vulnerability to future climate change, conservation intervention to manage habitat may be an effective option to offset some of the negative effects of a changing climate on D. involucrate and can improve the effectiveness of current PAs. Overall, this study highlights the necessity of integrating climate and land use change to project the future distribution of species.

Large variability in response to future climate and land‐use changes among Chinese Theaceae species

“…This study also provides useful information for guiding future conservation and management strategies, especially the land‐based management and conservation strategies, for protecting these Theaceae species under future climate and land use change. However, to accurately predict the future species distributions, future research are needed to incorporate diverse ecological processes, such as demographic processes, morphology and dispersal strategies (Meier et al, 2012 ), and more climate change scenarios (Tang & Zhao, 2022 ) into the future projections.…”

“…Climate change and land use change are currently two of the most important factors driving the distributional shifts for many species (Newbold, 2018 ; Powers & Jetz, 2019 ; Sala et al, 2000 ). Over the past decades, the isolated effects of these two global change factors on species' range shifts have been extensively assessed, which is expected to be negative or positive for individual species (e.g., Chen et al, 2011 ; Powers & Jetz, 2019 ; Tang & Zhao, 2022 ). However, it has become increasingly clear that these two factors do interact to drive shifts in the location of suitable habitat of a species, rather than act separately from one another (Auffret & Thomas, 2019 ).…”

“…However, an improved understanding of how the distribution of an individual species shifts under global change requires more detailed analyses by incorporating land use variables into climate SDMs (Prestele et al, 2021 ; Ramachandran et al, 2020 ), which has important implications for the protection of Theaceae species. For example, understanding the combined effect of climate change and land use change on the future distribution of a target species may help to design more targeted land‐management policies to offset the negative effects of climate change (Liu et al, 2022 ; Marshall et al, 2018 ; Prestele et al, 2021 ; Ramachandran et al, 2020 ; Tang et al, 2020 ; Tang & Zhao, 2022 ). Despite that, no studies have assessed the interacting effects of climate change and land use change on the future distributional changes of Theaceae species, especially the modulating effect of land use change within climate scenarios.…”

Conservation of Chinese Theaceae species under future climate and land use changes

“…We obtained spatial Polygon data for 1028 protected areas in China from Tang and Zhao (2022a). All polygons were converted to raster at a 10 km resolution by using the ‘Polygon to Raster’ tool in ArcGIS 10.2.…”

“…Human‐induced land use change, such as agriculture and urban expansion, is perhaps the most prominent factor driving range contractions and species extinctions (Newbold et al, 2015; Sala et al, 2000). At the same time, anthropogenic climate change is having an increasingly negative effect on biodiversity (Garcia et al, 2014; Tang et al, 2022; Thomas et al, 2004) and may pose more critical threats to biodiversity than land use changes (Préau et al, 2022; Tang & Zhao, 2022a). Moreover, biodiversity in a specific area may be particularly affected by the combined effect of these two drivers, which could amplify the negative impact of each stressor in isolation (Newbold, 2018; Prestele et al, 2021; Tang & Zhao, 2022b).…”