Global climate change will severely decrease potential distribution of the East Asian coldwater fish Rhynchocypris oxycephalus (Actinopterygii, Cyprinidae)

Abstract

Global climate change has been suggested to cause decrease of distribution area of many species. However, this has not been tested for East Asian inland coldwater fish. Chinese minnow (Rhynchocypris oxycephalus) is a small typical coldwater fish, which is endemic to East Asia and generally inhabits stream headwaters. Due to its occurrence in temperate south China, there is growing concern about its future fate in the face of global warming. In this study, we employed maximum entropy approach to analyze how distribution of this species would be impacted by future climate change. We collected data of 310 independent distribution points and 20 environmental variables, and conducted modeling under three general circulation models assuming two gas emission scenarios for 2020s, 2050s, and 2080s. The results showed that the Min temperature of coldest month was the most important climatic variable for potential distribution of the Chinese minnow. Modeling predicted geographical distribution of the Chinese minnow would shrink over time and become much more limited in all the situations especially in South-eastern China, and there would be little suitable habitat left in this region by 2080s. Our results confirm that climate change clearly poses a severe threat to the Chinese minnow, and we suggest that conservation efforts should focus on lower temperature areas within the current range, because these areas will remain relatively cool and may be still suitable for the Chinese minnow even under the most drastic climate change scenarios.

Climate change vulnerability assessment of species

“…A species' climate change vulnerability is inferred from differences between its recent distribution and its predicted potential future distribution in terms of extent, location and sometimes degree of fragmentation (e.g., Garcia, Araújo, et al, ), and also their degree of overlap (Huntley, Green, Collingham, & Willis, ). Correlative approaches have been used to predict species' potential distribution changes at various spatial scales (Pacifici et al, ), and have been widely applied to assess climate change vulnerability of plants (Fitzpatrick, Gove, Sanders, & Dunn, ; Midgley, Hannah, Millar, Rutherford, & Powrie, ; Thuiller, Lavorel, Araújo, Sykes, & Prentice, ), invertebrates (Harrison, Berry, Butt, & New, ; Heikkinen et al, ; Sánchez‐Fernández, Lobo, & Hernández‐Manrique, ; Settele et al, ) and vertebrates, including birds (Garcia, Burgess, Cabeza, Rahbek, & Araújo, ; Gregory et al, ; Hole et al, ), mammals (Hughes, Satasook, Bates, Bumrungsri, & Jones, ; Songer, Delion, Biggs, & Huang, ; Visconti et al, ), amphibians (Carvalho, Brito, Crespo, Watts, & Possingham, ; Lawler, Shafer, Bancroft, & Blaustein, ), and fishes (Jeschke & Strayer, ; Yu et al, ). We categorize methods for applying the correlative approach as climate envelope, regression‐based, machine learning and Bayesian, and describe available tools, data requirements and examples of their application (Table S4).…”

Large scale patterns in the diversity of lake fish assemblages in China and the effect of environmental factors

“…In the present study, MTCM acted as the main determinants in cluster II, mainly because the fishes distributed in assemblage II were adapted to temperate and a subtropical zone climate. Globally, MTCM had also been defined as the most important factor that determines the fish distributions and lives (Rubidge et al 2011;Yu et al 2013;Aguilar-Kirigin & Naya 2013). Other than these two factors, precipitation has always been considered as one of the most important climatic factors in numerous recent studies Buisson et al 2008;Buisson & Grenouillet 2009), because the precipitation could influence the stream flows and hydrological conditions.…”

Predicting fish species richness and assemblages with climatic, geographic and morphometric factors: A broad-scale study in Chinese lakes

“…However, thermal ranges exceeding the normal range will impact fish populations and distributions (Gislason et al, 2010;Gale et al, 2013). Extremely low temperatures may affect metabolism, breeding, growth, behavior, and thereby fish distributions (Rubidge et al, 2011;Yu et al, 2013;Aguilar-Kirigin and Naya, 2013). While the maximum temperature may influence fish communities due to the biochemical kinetics change in generating biodiversity (Allen et al, 2002;Brucet et al, 2013).…”