The application of Species Distribution Modeling for wetland restoration: A case study in the Songnen Plain, Northeast China

Abstract

<p>Species distribution models (SDMs) are an effective tool for measuring and predicting plant response to climate change, but their application to wetland species has been relatively limited. Here, we investigate the application of SDMs to study the current and future delimitation of wetlands in the Songnen Plain, one of the densest areas of natural wetlands in China. Specifically, we focus on the iconic wetland species <em>Phragmites australis</em>, one of the dominant species in the Songnen plain, which has been widely used for wetland restoration efforts.</p><p>Our study has four main goals: (i) to test and improve the applicability of SDM in our study; (ii) to delimit wetland areas for prioritization; (iii) to investigate the projected change in wetland distributions under future climate change scenarios; and (iv) to identify regions that appear more (or less) stable in the face of change, and to propose areas for suitable restoration efforts with land-use.</p><p>To achieve our goals, we apply a broad variety of environmental variables using MaxEnt, to project present and future (2050s) suitable areas under two representative concentration pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). AUC (area under the curve) is used as the test measure for model evaluation. To obtain a rich representative sampling of this species’ distribution, we use field-observational records from the National Science and Technology Fundamental Research Project “Investigation on Wetland Resource of China and Its Ecological and Environmental Benefits” (2013FY111800). In addition to exploring key abiotic parameters that influence <em>P. australis</em> distribution, we also explore the impact of different spatial resolutions (1 km<sup>2</sup>, 250 m<sup>2</sup>, 90 m<sup>2</sup>, 30 m<sup>2</sup>) of topographic information to assess model performance.</p><p>Our results demonstrated that the performance of the MaxEnt projection of <em>P. australis</em> was excellent (AUC=0.922), and improved with the addition of soil, topographic and hydrological variables, but did not improve significantly with increased resolutions of topographic variables. Using the optimized model, we delimited 28,644 km<sup>2</sup> of suitable areas and 7,959 km<sup>2</sup> of highly suitable areas under current scenarios. The future model under RCP4.5 scenario predicted a 9.5% and 3.1% increase in the suitable and highly suitable areas, respectively. The model under RCP8.5 predicted a much smaller increase in suitable areas, and a slight reduction in highly suitable habitat compared with the current scenario. Under both future scenarios, the geographic centers of potential habitat moved toward the southeast, with the mean latitude slightly rising. Finally, we delimited 2,364 km<sup>2</sup> of priority restoration areas under RCP4.5, including 152 km<sup>2</sup> of paddy field, 950 km<sup>2</sup> of dry field and 1,262 km<sup>2</sup> of saline-alkali land. The priority areas under RCP8.5 were smaller in all three land-use types.</p><p>Our study illuminates potential priority areas of the Songnen Plain for consideration in future wetland restoration efforts. For future research, we recommend more applications of SDMs with multiple species in wetland restoration, especially over larger scales and higher resolutions.</p>

Shrinking Habitats and Native Species Loss Under Climate Change: A Multifactorial Risk Assessment of China's Inland Wetlands

“…As expected, slope and water table depth were the two crucial topohydrological factors, since wetland vegetation depends on the waterlogged environment developing on a flat or gentle slope in tandem with local hydrology, making them strong indicators of wetland plant distribution in previous regional studies (Borde et al., 2020; Yan, Luan, et al., 2020; Yan, Feng, et al., 2020; Zhong et al., 2021). Not surprisingly, water table depth was found more important for annual species than perennial species because the germination and early seedling stage of most annual species in wetlands are dependent on the moist but not inundated environment created by the regular hydrologic pulse (Ge et al., 2013; Ma et al., 2014), whereas the growth of perennial species could be more resilient to water level fluctuation via vegetative reproduction and belowground biomass allocation (Warwick & Brock, 2003; Wei et al., 2019).…”

“…Meanwhile, the growing influence of anthropogenic climate change on wetlands has been reported to drive area loss (Xi et al., 2021) and disruption in ecosystem functioning (e.g., carbon sink) (Moomaw et al., 2018; Salimi et al., 2021), which adds further uncertainty to the future of these threatened ecosystems under persistent anthropogenic disturbance, and heightens the urgency for wetland conservation. While a number of wetland conservation actions have been carried out worldwide, climate change imposes potential challenges on wetland management because current priority conservation areas may not sustain long‐term effectiveness due to climate‐driven changes in wetland environments and species suitability (Hoffmann et al., 2019; Zhong et al., 2021). To develop efficient and effective wetland conservation strategies, it is essential to incorporate climate change impacts and species responses in decision‐making.…”

“…Thus, proper wetland protection requires understanding the relationships between the spatial patterns of wetland plant species and their environment, and how future environmental changes potentially alter species suitability in wetlands (Moor et al., 2015; Short et al., 2016; Zheng et al., 2019). Generally, climatic factors, especially factors controlling water supply and seasonal hydrologic pulsing of wetlands (e.g., precipitation of the growing season, snowfall, isothermality), are recognized to be central in governing wetland species distributions at larger geographical scales (Garris et al., 2015; Xue et al., 2018; Zhong et al., 2021). At the same time, the impacts of soil and topographic variables can strongly influence landscape‐level distributions of species because of their great heterogeneity across relatively small distances (Osland et al., 2019; Zhong et al., 2021).…”

Influence of the Environment on the Distribution and Quality of Gentiana dahurica Fisch.

“…In most previous studies, only climatic factors were used as influencing factors to model species distribution; it is widely recognized that climate plays a major role in limiting species distributions at broad spatial scales. However, the homogeneity of climate factors at the landscape scale may affect the predicted distribution results, while soil type and elevation may show significant complexity at local scales which help model construction and interpretation of population prediction results ( Figueiredo et al, 2018 ; Zuquim et al, 2020 ; Zhong et al, 2021 ).…”

“…The geographical distribution of species is an important feature of different regions and is affected by environmental and human disturbances. Climatic and soil conditions are the main environmental factors that determine the distribution of species ( Manthey and Box, 2007 ; Zhong et al, 2021 ). Species distribution models (SDMs) have been used to simulate geographical distributions and explore the environmental niche and potential distributions of species based on their spatial location and environmental variables.…”