Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Climate change is continuously affecting the ecosystem, species distribution as well as global biodiversity. The assessment of the species potential distribution under various climate change scenarios is a significant step towards the conservation and mitigation of species loss and vulnerability. In this context, the present study aimed to predict the influence of current and future climate on an ecologically vulnerable medicinal species, Garcinia gummi-gutta, of the Western Ghats using Maximum Entropy modelling. The future projections were made for the period of 2050 and 2070 with RCP scenario of 4.5 and 8.5 using 84 species occurrence data, and climatic variables from three different models (HadGEM2-CC, GFDL-CM3, and NorESM1-M) of IPCC fifth assessment. Climatic variables contributions were assessed using jackknife test and mean AOC 0.888, TSS 0.698, and kappa 0.733 indicate the model performs with very high accuracy. The major influencing variables will be annual precipitation (32.51±1.4%), precipitation of coldest quarter (16.57±0.6), precipitation seasonality (12.56±1.3), and precipitation of driest quarter (11.73±.73). The model result shows that the current high potential distribution of the species is around 1.90% of the study area, 7.78% is good potential; about 90.32% is moderate to very low potential for species suitability. Finally, the results of all model represented that there will be a drastic decline in the suitable habitat distribution by 2050 and 2070 for all the RCP scenarios. The results can be used to understand the suitable climatic conditions and the identification of suitable and alternate areas where is likely to reintroduce under climate change.