Projected changes in climatic suitability for Kinosternon turtles by 2050 and 2070

Abstract

Chelonians are expected to be negatively impacted by climate change due to limited vagility and temperature‐dependent sex determination. However, few studies have examined how freshwater turtle distributions may shift under different climate change scenarios. We used a maximum entropy approach to model the distribution of five widespread North American Kinosternon species (K. baurii, K. flavescens, K. hirtipes, K. sonoriense, and K. subrubrum) under four climate change scenarios. We found that areas with suitable climatic conditions for K. baurii and K. hirtipes are expected to decline substantially during the 21st century. In contrast, the area with suitable climate for K. sonoriense will remain essentially unchanged, while areas suitable for K. flavescens and K. subrubrum are expected to substantially increase. The centroid for the distribution of four of the five species shifted northward, while the centroid for K. sonoriense shifted slightly southward. Overall, centroids shifted at a median rate of 37.5 km per decade across all scenarios. Given the limited dispersal ability of turtles, it appears unlikely that range shifts will occur rapidly enough to keep pace with climate change during the 21st century. The ability of chelonians to modify behavioral and physiological responses in response to unfavorable conditions may allow turtles to persist for a time in areas that have become increasingly unsuitable, but this plasticity will likely only delay local extinctions.

Climate change winners and losers: The effects of climate change on five palm species in the Southeastern United States

“…We downloaded records of these five species from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (https://www.gbif.org/) and combined them with undigitized herbarium records from Cornell and the New York Botanical Gardens. We followed the procedures outlined in Butler, Stanila, and Iverson (2016) for data processing and model building. We eliminated duplicates and records from outside the native range and resampled the locality data to one record per 25 km 2 .…”

“…We followed the procedure outlined by Butler et al. (2016) and only included the variables with the most useful predictive information (i.e., the highest gain when used in isolation), as well as the variables that provided unique predictive information. As regularization multipliers ( β ) are an important component of model prediction and complexity (Moreno‐Amat et al., 2015), we used the regularization approach implemented in ENMtools (Warren, Matzke, & Cardillo, 2019) and small sample corrected variant of Akaike's information criterion (AICc) scores were used to evaluate models (Warren & Seifert, 2011) using all possible combinations of the variables that did not exhibit high multicollinearity (e.g., | r | < .8).…”

“…We classified the model results into five bands of suitability, following Butler et al. (2016): 0%–10% suitable, 10%–20% suitable, 20%–35% suitable, 35%–50% suitable, and >50% suitable. Response curves were generated for the variables in the top models to identify the range of values where suitability was >50%.…”

A Simulation Study of the Geographical Distribution of <i>Actinidia arguta</i> in China

“…We selected the best model with the highest AUC value. The remaining model settings were set to the same as those of the initial model [43][44]. The file output by the MaxEnt model is in ASCII format, and it cannot be visually displayed on the map.…”

A Review of the Effects of Climate Change on Chelonians

“…For example, the amount of suitable habitat for the Rio Grande Cooter (Pseudemys gorzugi) was predicted to increase by the 2050s and then decline substantially by the 2070s [108]. Similarly, models of the projected distribution of five Kinosternon species under various climate scenarios show that the distribution of two species were predicted to substantially decline, one was forecast to remain essentially unchanged, and the ranges for two species were expected to substantially increase [109]. The amount of suitable bioclimatic conditions for red-eared sliders in the Great Lakes Basin is expected to increase from 26% up to potentially 50% by 2050 [110].…”