Background: The aim of this study is to investigate how climate change influences the distribution of economically and environmentally important species of P. abyssinica and H. citrispinum in Ethiopia. The species distribution modeling intends to forecast species' ecological niche ranges and habitat suitability by employing a variety of environmental parameters as predictors, which is vital for conservation planning and restoration success. Six representative concentration pathways (RCP 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5 for the years 2050 and 2070) with the same resolution of 2.5 min that shows the emission scenarios were used for the prediction. To predict the current and future distributions of H. citrispinum and P. abyssinica 56 and 45 occurrence records from National Herbarium, Addis Ababa University, GBIF, and available literatures were used respectively.
Results: The MaxEnt model predicted habitat suitability for H. citrispinum species with an Area Under Curve (AUC) value of 0.961 ± 0.027, and 0.809 ± 0.045 for P. abyssinica, indicating excellent discriminatory ability or accuracy under the current climate scenario. The Future distribution of suitable habitat for both H. citrispinum and P. abyssinica plant species was accurately predicted with AUC values of 0.960 ± 0.017 and 0.780 ± 0.35, respectively under future climatic scenarios. The jackknife test result indicates that environmental variables such as topographic position index (92.5%), precipitation of the driest quarter (3%) and precipitation in the coldest quarter (1.8%) are associated with the distributions of H. citrispinum, while topographic position index (36.6%), precipitation of driest quarter (21.4%), precipitation of warmest quarter (16.2%) and precipitation seasonality (13.9%) were found to be limiting environmental variables for P. abyssinica under current and future climatic conditions in Ethiopia. The prediction map and interception calculation for both present and projected (in the 2050s and again in the 2070s) climate change scenarios indicate significant habitat loss, decreased, and fragmentation under all RCPs (2.6, 4.5, and 8.5) scenarios for P. abyssinica while habitat gain, and increasing for H. citrispinum in Ethiopia.
Conclusions: Topographic position index (TPI) is the most impactful predictor variable on the distribution of the two species. Consequently, potentially habitable areas (with diverse aspects and slopes) are increasing for H. citrispinum while decreasing for P. abyssinica.
Keywords: Ethiopia; Habitat suitability; Helichrysum citrispinum; MaxEnt; Modeling; Peperomia abyssinica.
© 2023. The Author(s).