Distributional responses to climate change for alpine species of Cyananthus and Primula endemic to the Himalaya-Hengduan Mountains.

ABSTRACT: Global warming increases the vulnerability of plants, especially alpine herbaceous species, to local extinction. In this study, we collected species distribution information from herbarium specimens for ten selected Cyananthus and Primula alpine species endemic to the Himalaya-Hengduan Mountains (HHM). Combined with climate data from WorldClim, we used Maximum Entropy Modeling (MaxEnt) to project distributional changes from the current time period to 2070. Our predictions indicate that, under a wide range of climate change scenarios, the distributions of all species will shift upward in elevation and northward in latitude; furthermore, under these scenarios, species will expand the size of their range. For the majority of the species in this study, habitats are available to mitigate upward

SUBMITTER: He X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6412159 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature