Planning priority conservation areas for biodiversity under climate change in topographically complex areas: A case study in Sichuan province, China

PLoS One. 2020 Dec 23;15(12):e0243425. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243425. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Identifying priority conservation areas plays a significant role in conserving biodiversity under climate change, but uncertainties create challenges for conservation planning. To reduce uncertainties in the conservation planning framework, we developed an adaptation index to assess the effect of topographic complexity on species adaptation to climate change, which was incorporated into the conservation framework as conservation costs. Meanwhile, the species distributions were predicted by the Maxent model, and the priority conservation areas were optimized during different periods in Sichuan province by the Marxan model. Our results showed that the effect of topographic complexity was critical for species adaptation, but the adaptation index decreased with the temperature increase. Based on the conservation targets and costs, the distributions of priority conservation areas were mainly concentrated in mountainous areas around the Sichuan Basin where may be robust to the adaptation to climate change. In the future, the distributions of priority conservation areas had no evident changes, accounting for about 26% and 28% of the study areas. Moreover, most species habitats could be conserved in terms of conservation targets in these priority conservation areas. Therefore, our approach could achieve biodiversity conservation goals and be highly practical. More importantly, quantifying the effect of topography also is critical for options for planning conservation areas in response to climate change.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adaptation, Physiological / physiology*
  • Biodiversity*
  • China
  • Climate Change*
  • Conservation of Natural Resources*
  • Ecosystem
  • Humans

Grants and funding

This work was supported by a Youth Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/) Project Grant (41701114) and by the West Light Foundation of The Chinese Academy of Sciences (http://www.cas.cn) Project Grant (Y7R280080) to Yafeng Lu, Pei Xu, Yukuan Wang. Additionally, the General Program of Beijing Natural Science Foundation (http://kw.beijing.gov.cn/) Project Grant (8182018) provided support in the form of salary for authors [Qinwen Li and Cheng Wu]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.