BackgroundThe ecosystems across Tibetan Plateau are changing rapidly under the influence of climate warming, which has caused substantial changes in spatial and temporal environmental patterns. Stipa purpurea, as a dominant herbsage resource in alpine steppe, has a great influence on animal husbandry in the Tibetan Plateau. Global warming has been forecasted to continue in the future (2050s, 2070s), questioning the future distribution of S. purpurea and its response to climate change. The maximum entropy (MaxEnt) modeling, due to its multiple advantages (e.g. uses presence-only data, performs well with incomplete data, and requires small sample sizes and gaps), has been used to understand species environment relationships and predict species distributions across locations that have not been sampled.ResultsAnnual mean temperature, annual precipitation, temperature seasonality, altitude, and precipitation during the driest month, significantly affected the distribution of S. purpurea. Only 0.70% of the Tibetan Plateau area included a very highly suitable habitat (habitat suitability [HS] = 0.8–1.0). Highly suitable habitat (HS = 0.6–0.8), moderately suitable habitat (HS = 0.4–0.6), and unsuitable habitat (HS = 0.2–0.4) occupied 6.20, 14.30 and 22.40% of the Tibetan Plateau area, respectively, and the majority (56.40%) of the Tibetan Plateau area constituted a highly unsuitable habitat (HS = 0–0.2). In addition, the response curves of species ecological suitability simulated by generalized additive model nearly corresponded with the response curves generated by the MaxEnt model.ConclusionsAt a temporal scale, the habitat suitability of S. purpurea tends to increase from the 1990s to 2050s, but decline from the 2050s to 2070s. At a spatial scale, the future distribution of S. purpurea will not exhibit sweeping changes and will remain in the central and southeastern regions of the Tibetan Plateau. These results benefit the local animal husbandry and provide evidence for establishing reasonable management practices.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12898-018-0165-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The upper reaches of the Minjiang River (URMR), located on the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau in southwestern China, are an important component of the ecological barrier of the Upper Yangtze River Basin. Climate change and human activities have increased the ecological sensitivity and vulnerability of the region, which may pose a threat to the ecological security of the Yangtze River Basin and have negative impacts on local social and economic development. In this study, we analyzed land use and cover change (LUCC) of the URMR between 2000 and 2010, and found that the total rate of LUCC was less than 0.50% during this period. In addition, net primary production (NPP) was employed to describe the changes in ecosystem sensitivity and vulnerability, and the results demonstrated that slightly and moderately sensitive and vulnerable zones occupied the largest area, distributed mainly in forest, shrub, and grassland ecosystems. However, compared with the period from 2000 to 2005, the ecological sensitivity and vulnerability showed a worsening trend in the period 2005–2010. Exploring the relationship between vulnerability/sensitivity and environmental factors, we found that sensitivity and vulnerability were positively correlated with precipitation (>700 mm) and aridity index (>36 mm/°C). The results highlight that the future ecological sensitivity and vulnerability of URMR should be further investigated, and that the LUCC induced by human activities and climate change have caused alteration of in ecosystem vulnerability.