Potential range expansion and niche shift of the invasive Hyphantria cunea between native and invasive countries

Abstract

1. Hyphantria cunea is a problematic invasive species that has caused considerable damage to agricultural and forestry ecosystems in China.2. We compared 19 bioclimate variables between its native country (the United States of America) and China to elucidate the environmental factors associated with its presence. Using present climate data and projected future climate data (2050 and 2070) based on two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs 2.6 and 8.5), we used MaxEnt to predict the suitable habitat areas for H. cunea in the USA and China. Using these analyses, we predicted the niche change of H. cunea in China using the 'ecospat' package in R.3. Our model predicts that climate change will generally increase the extent of suitable habitat in both China and the USA, although low latitude areas will be limited by future climate change. We also report low niche overlap between the USA and Chinese populations of H. cuena and significant differences in bioclimate variables associate with its presence in each country. Therefore, our results suggest H. cunea has adapted to several climatic conditions in China. This indicates the niche of H. cunea may shift and adapt to novel environmental conditions over the course of its spread.4. Overall, the analysis of the environmental characteristics, niche changes, and suitable areas of H. cunea provides a basis for pest control and management strategies aimed at preventing further spread. Our methods may also be used to study other similar invasive species.

Species Distribution Models of the Spartina alterniflora Loisel in Its Origin and Invasive Country Reveal an Ecological Niche Shift

“…To explore the direction of the core distributional shifts between current and future ranges, we summarized the distribution to a single point, the centroid of suitable distribution (Vanderwal et al, 2013;Brown, 2014). We determined the migration direction of the geographical centroids for S. alterniflora under different RCP conditions and different periods by ArcGIS 10.4.1 (Yu et al, 2019;Tang et al, 2021b).…”

New Evidence on the Linkage of Population Trends and Species Traits to Long-Term Niche Changes

“…The quantification of the realized niche of a species [1] (sensu Grinnell [2][3][4][5], hereafter niche) and how it varies across space and time has received increasing attention in ecological Birds 2022, 3 150 studies, with important implications in evolution, biogeography, and conservation [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Many studies have focused on niche evolution in related taxa [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], or on niche quantification of alien species to assess their potential as invaders in non-native ranges [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. However, niche quantification and change in avian species remain poorly investigated aspects, especially if compared to other research topics (e.g., population trend assessment).…”

Niche Filling Dynamics of Ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia L.) during Global Invasion

“…ENMTools was used to calculate Pearson correlations between all variables in order to avoid model overfitting [ 94 ]. Then, we used the default parameters of the model for pre-modeling and deleted the variables with Pearson correlation coefficients greater than 0.8 while also removing variables with low contribution rates [ 95 , 96 ]. Finally, the model was constructed using temperature seasonality (Bio_4), annual precipitation (Bio_12), precipitation during the driest month (Bio_14), and the Human Influence Index (HII).…”