Prediction of the Suitable Area of the Chinese White Pines (Pinus subsect. Strobus) under Climate Changes and Implications for Their Conservation

Abstract

White pines (Pinus subsect. Strobus) play important roles in forest ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere. Species of this group are narrowly distributed or endangered in China. In this study, we used a species distribution model (SDM) to project and predict the distribution patterns of the 12 species of Chinese white pine under a variety of paleoclimatic and future climate change scenarios based on 39 high-resolution environmental variables and 1459 distribution records. We also computed the centroid shift, range expansion/contraction, and suitability change of the current distribution area to assess the potential risk to each species in the future. The modeling results revealed that the suitable habitat of each species is consistent with but slightly larger than its actual distribution range and that temperature, precipitation, and UV radiation are important determining factors for the distribution of different white pine species. The results indicate that the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) greatly affected the current distribution of the Chinese white pine species. Additionally, it was predicted that under the future climate change scenarios, there will be a reduction in the area of habitats suitable for P. armandii, P. morrisonicola, and P. mastersiana. Furthermore, some of the current distribution sites of P. armandii, P. kwangtungensis, P. mastersiana, P. morrisonicola, P. sibirica, and P. wallichiana were predicted to become more unsuitable under these scenarios. These results indicate that some Chinese white pine species, such as P. armandii, P. morrisonicola, and P. mastersiana, may have a very high risk of population shrinkage in the future. Overall, this study provided relevant data for the long-term conservation (both in situ and ex situ) and sustainable management of Chinese white pine species.

Impact of Past and Future Climate Change on the Potential Distribution of an Endangered Montane Shrub Lonicera oblata and Its Conservation Implications

“…Temperature and precipitation are two major environmental factors affecting the distribution of sessile plant species, especially cold tolerance, growth-season temperatures, and the available water supply for alpine vegetation [79,80]. Temperature seasonality (Bio4), precipitation seasonality (Bio15), and mean temperature of coldest quarter (Bio11) in our model each contributed greatly to the predicted distribution of L. oblata (Tables 1 and S10), probably because the temperature during the summer is often high in China; however, the minimum temperature and temperature variation in the winter can vary substantially with latitude [81,82]. Temperature seasonality is positively correlated with latitude [83], and strong seasonal variation in temperature may inhibit the growth of vegetation [84].…”

Natural Hybrid Origin of the Controversial “Species” Clematis × pinnata (Ranunculaceae) Based on Multidisciplinary Evidence

“…We ran 10 bootstrap replicates, in which 25% was used for model testing and the other 75% of the presence data was randomly selected for model training to optimize the model. The model was parameterized with a maximum of 10,000 background points, a convergence threshold of 0.00001, and a maximum of 500 interactions (Lin et al, 2020).…”

“…An AUC value is the area enclosed by the receiver operating characteristic curve and the abscissa, and the closer the value is to 1, the more predictively accurate the model is (Fielding and Bell, 1997;Babar et al, 2012). We used the jackknife method to evaluate the weight of each environmental factor on the distribution area, and based on these values, we classified potentially suitable habitats into four categories (which was widely applied by other niche modeling studies, such as Tang et al, 2017;Shitara et al, 2018;Lin et al, 2020, and many others) in a final predictive map of species: unsuitable (<0.2), barely suitable (0.2-0.4), moderately suitable (0.4-0.6), highly suitable (>0.6).…”

Distributional Response of the Rare and Endangered Tree Species Abies chensiensis to Climate Change in East Asia

“…Climate changes exert a significant influence on the geographical distribution of organisms. Consequently, the distribution patterns of species can reflect climatic conditions [ 47 , 48 , 49 ]. Pandey et al conclude that the species distribution pattern of gymnosperms in China was mainly influenced by energy–water dynamics [ 50 ].…”