Effects of Climate Change on the Climatic Niches of Warm-Adapted Evergreen Plants: Expansion or Contraction?

Abstract

Abstract:Climate change has modified the structure and functions of ecosystems, affecting human well-being. Evergreen plants in the warm-temperate ecosystems will lose climatically suitable habitats under climate change but have not drawn much scholarly interest. Therefore, the present research aimed to predict the future climatic niches of eight coastal warm-adapted evergreen trees under climate change to provide information for an effective management practice. For this purpose, we used the ensemble species distribution models (SDMs) weighted by the TSS value in modelling the climatic niches of those evergreen trees and then ensembled their future distributions predicted under 20 future climate scenarios. Except for Neolitsea sericea (True Skill Statistic (TSS) = 0.79), all projections for the current climatic niches of evergreens showed excellent predictive powers (TSS > 0.85). The results showed that the climatic niches of the four evergreens-Castanopsis cuspidata, Pittosporum tobira, Raphiolepis indica var. umbellate, and Eurya emarginata-would expand to the northern part of the Korean Peninsula (KP) under climate change, but the ones of the remaining four-Kadsura japonica, Neolitsea sericea, Ilex integra, and Dendropanax morbiferus-would shrink. While the climatic niches of Pittosporum tobira showed the rapidest and greatest expansion under climate change, Dendropanax morbiferus was predicted to experience the greatest loss of habitat. On the other hand, regardless of whether the future distributions of climatically suitable habitats would expand or contract, the highly suitable habitats of all species were predicted to decline under climate change. This may indicate that further climate change will degrade habitat suitability for all species within the distribution boundary and restrict continuous habitat expansions of expanding species or accelerate habitat loss of shrinking species. In addition, the future distributions of most coastal evergreens were found to be confined to coastal areas; therefore, sea-level rise would accelerate their habitat loss under climate change. The present study provides primary and practical knowledge for understanding climate-related coastal vegetation changes for future conservation planning, particularly on the Korean Peninsula.

Assessing Climate Change Impact on Forest Habitat Suitability and Diversity in the Korean Peninsula

“…The estimation of habitat suitability of the three forest types for the baseline period was similar to that of many previous research studies and surveys [16,17,50,51]. In the case of warm temperate evergreen forest, suitable areas were found in Jeju Island and the southern coast of the Korean Peninsula (Figure 3).…”

“…Most previous studies on future forest distributions in the Korean Peninsula show detailed changes based on individual species changes, whereas this study predicted overall changes through representative forest types [13,16,17,24,53]. Nevertheless, our results on habitat suitability of subalpine forest showed a decrease as in Koo et al [52]'s study, habitat suitability of warm temperate forests increased as in studies of Park et al [16] and Koo et al [28], and spatial distributions also showed the same patterns.…”

“…The concept of forest habitat suitability assessed in the present study is evaluated for each forest type as suitability in terms of climatic conditions in a spatial unit, and only considers climatic factors. Many previous studies have also found a forest habitat suitable area, or forest potential distribution, using only major climate variables [13,14,17,18,24].…”

“…SDM finds suitable growth areas for the changing environment through the past occurrence data of species. The representative tools for the SDM are maximum entropy (MaxEnt), generalized linear model (GLM), generalized additive model (GAM), and random forest (RF) [11,[16][17][18].…”

Assessing Habitat Suitability of Parasitic Plant Cistanche deserticola in Northwest China under Future Climate Scenarios

“…Species distribution models (SDMs) can provide information in this area, so it has been widely applied to the study of conservation area planning, and the impact of climate change on species distribution. At present, the study of SDMs has carried out climate change on animals [15][16][17][18], plants [19,20], landscape ecology [21], swamp vegetation [22], Chinese medicinal materials [23], and so on. Many algorithms have been applied to the construction of SDMs.…”