ArticleLife & Medical SciencesProjected impacts of climate change on protected birds and nature reserves in China
Introduction
The last decades have witnessed great changes in global climate, with the averaged warming rate of the last 50 years is nearly twice for the last 100 years 1., 2.. Climate change has significant impact on community composition 3., 4., phenological patterns [5], and ecosystem structure [6] of terrestrial and marine ecosystem 7., 8.. Recent studies demonstrated not only latitudinal 9., 10. but also elevational 11., 12. species range shifts in different regions caused by climate change. These projected range shifts would also threaten the effectiveness of nature reserves in the future 13., 14., 15., 16..
The fate of protected species with relative small range and narrow niches under climate change has caused special concern 17., 18., 19.. It is generally recognized that protected species are more vulnerable to climate change 20., 21. because their specific requirements of habitat reduce their adaptive capacity to climate change [22]. As the ‘‘climate refugia’’ of protected species, nature reserves (e.g., protected areas, national parks) would lose their effectiveness under climate change, as species may move out of current distributions or face local extinction [15]. It had been predicted that the amount of potential habitat within protected areas would decrease under climate change [23]. Successful management of nature reserves would be implemented by protecting species from their threaten factors; it is increasingly clear that climate change should be taken into consideration when developing protection programs or designing nature reserves for rare or endangered species 14., 23., 24.. However, biodiversity conservation is biased by knowledge gaps of species distributions, and further studies are needed in data-poor regions [25].
It has been argued that China would be one of the most heavily impacted regions in the world under climate change 26., 27.. Localized studies of individual species in China have found evidence for potentially negative effects of climate change such as range shrink 28., 29., 30.. However, how climate change would affect China’s bird species, protected bird in particular, has rarely been studied 28., 29., 31., partly due to incomplete species occurrence data. In addition, most nature reserves in China were established without systematic planning [32] and climate change consideration, which may lead to a limited level of effectiveness against climate change.
The reliability of biogeography study is highly dependent on the data quality that fits for the purpose 33., 34.. However, a bird distribution database that is convenient for spatial analysis in China has rarely been studied 35., 36.. In recent years, citizen science 34., 37. displayed a great potential in providing extensive data on species distributions 38., 39., 40., 41. but its inherent identification errors and geographical biases have been criticized 42., 43..
We used species distribution modeling (SDM) to examine distribution range shift, species turnover rate and conservation effectiveness of Chinese protected birds. SDM 44., 45., 46. is a useful tool in assessing the impact of climate change on protected species [47] and conservation areas 14., 23.. These models help us to understand the relationship between species occurrence and environment, and project it into future distributions under climate change. Widespread use of SDM has been criticized by its uncertainty; it has been reported that variable-selection 48., 49., thresholding techniques 50., 51. and the choice of future climate scenarios [52] would alter model projections. However, models under careful treatment remain to be effective approaches widely used in assessing the impact of climate change 14., 53., 54.. We addressed these problems by using a carefully selected set of environmental variables including climatic and non-climatic factors, a pre-comparison among different thresholds and parameters, and a voting approach to dealing with discrepancy among model outputs.
To investigate the potential impact of climate change on Chinese protected birds, we used citizen-based distribution data of 108 protected bird species and SDM, to: (1) explore the potential impact of climate change; (2) quantify and map the spatial pattern of species range shift; (3) evaluate the potential effectiveness of nature reserves in China under climate change.
Section snippets
Study area and species distribution data
The main study area was the mainland of China including Hong Kong (China for short); all islands were removed except for Hainan Island. The climate of China is extremely diverse, with a subarctic climate in northern parts, whereas a tropical climate in southern fringes. Monsoon winds dominate most eastern regions, but Qinghai–Tibet Plateau has a different climate due to high elevations.
Using a citizen-based database developed from bird-watching reports [55], we investigated 108 breeding species
Species distribution modeling
Here, we adopted MAXENT [67], a machine-learning algorithm based on the principle of maximum entropy, to predict potential distribution. MAXENT is one of the best presence-only SDMs which is robust to biased samples 68., 69., 70.. For each species, presence data were randomly partitioned into two sets, using 75 % for training and 25 % for validation. We implemented MAXENT using version 3.3 (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~schapire/maxent/) and default settings recommended [71]. Area under the
Results
Our results indicate that most species would experience habitat shrink and northward shift in a future, wetter and warmer China (Table S3 in Supporting Information), and this range shift would become more prominent through timelines (Table 1). Under the full dispersal assumption, 19 species would lose more than half of their habitats by 2080 for A2 scenario (13 for B2 scenario), and 11 (6 for B2) of them (see Table S1 in Supporting Information) would suffer from more serious habitat loss (>80
Discussion
We successfully modeled (AUC 0.94 ± 0.06) climate change impacts on 108 protected bird species and protected areas. Our results reinforce the widely recognized point of view that under future climate change, specie ranges would shift northward or upward 12., 78., 79.. More than 85 % of protected bird species would become climate losers under A2/B2 scenarios. Future suitable habitats for protected birds will beyond their current ranges, leading to drops in protection effectiveness for nature
Main conclusion
Our results provide the first detailed assessment of protected birds and nature reserve network in China under future climate change. Some key species and nature reserves that need specific concerns were displayed in our study. In consistence with previous studies, species will migrate northward and upward due to climate change, resulting in effectiveness decline of nature reserves. Southern China will lose suitable climate habitat for protected bird species, while northeast areas and
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (“863” Program) (2009AA12200101) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41471347). We thank Wen Hanqiuzi, Fumin Lei and Sergey Venevesky for their comments on the paper.
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2017, Biological ConservationCitation Excerpt :Here, therefore, we address these questions for highly biodiverse and heavily visited protected areas in China. China has a large area, a very large population, and high biodiversity (Ding et al., 2012; Li et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2015; Luo et al., 2015; Wu et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2016a, 2016b; Zhao et al., 2016). It has a high degree of land conversion to primary production outside protected areas; numerous parks and nature reserves with high biodiversity and high visitation rates (Cao et al., 2015; Guo et al., 2015; Ren et al., 2015; Wu et al., 2011; Xie et al., 2015; Xu et al., 2014a, 2014b; Yang, 2012; Zhong et al., 2015a, 2015b); and considerable anthropogenic modification to most of its existing protected areas (Buckley et al., 2016a, 2016b).