Locating North African microrefugia for mountain tree species from landscape ruggedness and fossil records

Hasnaoui, Yassine El; Mhammdi, Nadia; Bajolle, Lisa; Nourelbait, Majda; Bouimetarhan, Ilham; Cheddadi, Rachid

doi:10.1016/j.jafrearsci.2020.103996

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Mountains may contain a wide range of microhabitats and microclimates for long-term survival of upland tree species (Morelli et al, 2020). The approach of maintaining populations of a plant species locally would be more successful if we assess its genetic diversity with modern molecular markers (Barrows et al, 2020;Pautasso, 2009), analyze the ability of the mountain to provide a microrefugium (El Hasnaoui et al, 2020;Valencia et al, 2016), use historical information to understand long-term dynamics and potential resilience (Birks, 2012), and consider the most influential climate factors such as expected increasing aridity in the Mediterranean (Gao et al, 2006).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Priority conservation areas for Cedrus atlantica in the Atlas Mountains, Morocco

Cheddadi

Taberlet

Boyer

et al. 2022

Conservat Sci and Prac

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Assessing biodiversity loss and species extinction is necessary to warn society and raise awareness of the impacts of ongoing climate change. Prioritizing protected areas is the pragmatic and applicable management measure under the pressure of ongoing climate change and limited resources to conserve species at risk of extinction. We developed a novel conservation index (CI) to prioritize areas and populations of an endangered mountain tree species that need protection in the face of ongoing climate change, as conservation of all populations may not be realistic. This CI integrates (1) mountain topography to identify potential refugial areas with suitable microclimates, (2) genetic diversity to assess the adaptive capacity of local populations, and (3) hypothetical climate change in the species' range. We applied this CI to Atlas cedar, an endemic and threatened species whose populations are scattered throughout the Moroccan mountains. This index provided a scale for 33 populations studied and suggests that genetically diverse populations located in rugged areas where future local climate may overlap with their current climatic niche should receive a higher conservation priority. This index may also be applicable to other mountain species with scattered populations and is likely to be more accurate if more precise climate data are used at the microrefugia scale.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Priority conservation areas for Cedrus atlantica in the Atlas Mountains, Morocco

Cheddadi

Taberlet

Boyer

et al. 2022

Conservat Sci and Prac

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“…Furthermore, the abiotic and biotic diversities of different areas should be comparable [55], which is why the methods for their assessment ought to be standardized. Another path that the methodological development of assessing geodiversity should take is incorporating other components of the landscape metrics into the geodiversity index [32,46], not only to assess the richness of the elements, but also their even distribution.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The terrain characteristics (i.e., its slopes, orientations and, hence, its convexity and concavity [28]) form an integral part of scientific exploration and development in biological studies [30], robotics [31], and other disciplines, as well as when interpreting or valuing either biotic [32] or abiotic environments [33]. When it comes to the abiotic ones, the ruggedness of the terrain becomes explicit, since a plethora of studies gives a special place to the terrain ruggedness when calculating the geodiversity index [11,12,[34][35][36].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Transferable Use of Terrain Ruggedness Component in the Geodiversity Index

Stojilković

2022

Resources

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Geodiversity, as diversity of the abiotic environment, includes terrain ruggedness (or roughness), which is one of the essential parts of geodiversity evaluation. The terrain ruggedness index (R) represents the value of one of the main geodiversity components. The purpose of the study is to discuss the characteristics of R in the scope of geodiversity, and to show how R differs within two specific study areas if we study them using a data scale that covers both areas and only site-specific data. Hence, the main methods include geodiversity element mapping, calculating R based on either the study area or broader-scale data and discussing the differences that arise. The findings show that R should not be calculated only within individual study areas if the results among different study areas are to be compared; rather, it should first be calculated on a larger scale for the whole region in which we are about to compare the specific study areas. The applied value of these results is that such data are then suitable for calculating the geodiversity index (G) according to specific methodological steps and for further analyses.

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“…Tr is the terrain ruggedness (Figure 2). Mountains with highly heterogeneous topography may host local microclimates that differ from regional climates [13,14,47]. Mountain topography, quantitatively measured using various indices, helps predict suitable habitats for species [48].…”

Section: Conservation Indexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Guiding Conservation for Mountain Tree Species in Lebanon

Cheddadi

Khater

2022

Forests

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The objective of this study is to contribute to the conservation of upland tree species in the face of climate change. We used a conservation index to prioritize the areas and populations of three conifer species in the mountains of Lebanon. This conservation index integrates (1) mountain topography to identify areas that could provide a suitable microclimate, (2) genetic diversity to assess the adaptive capacity of populations in these mountain areas, and (3) a hypothetical climate change scenario that could affect this Mediterranean region. The idea of this index is to prioritize protected areas based on a match between the relevance of the area to be protected and the populations that need local and long-term protection. The stronger the match, the higher the priority of the area to be protected. We applied this conservation index to 36 populations of 15 fir, 15 cedar, and 6 juniper. These populations were genotyped by different authors whose published data we used. The results show that 10 populations of the 3 species have a very high index and 9 others have a lower but still high index, indicating a high conservation priority. These 19 populations occur in 5 different areas that we delineated and that form a network along the Lebanon Mountains. We hypothesize that the conservation of these 19 populations across the Lebanon Mountains could contribute to the long-term sustainability of the 3 species in the face of a 2 °C increase in mean seasonal temperature and a 20% decrease in seasonal precipitation compared to the current climate.

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Locating North African microrefugia for mountain tree species from landscape ruggedness and fossil records

Cited by 5 publications

References 44 publications

Priority conservation areas for Cedrus atlantica in the Atlas Mountains, Morocco

Priority conservation areas for Cedrus atlantica in the Atlas Mountains, Morocco

Towards Transferable Use of Terrain Ruggedness Component in the Geodiversity Index

Guiding Conservation for Mountain Tree Species in Lebanon

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