PJB-2018-561
Will global climate change facilitate plant invasions in conservation areas?
Chun-Jing Wang, Ji-Zhong Wan and Zhi-Xiang Zhang
Abstract
Climate change may increase plant invasion risk, but few studies have paid attention to the relationship between climate change and plant invasion in conservation areas at a global scale. The primary objective of our study was to determine whether climate change would allow or even increase the likelihood that invasive alien plant species would invade conservation areas across the world and in particular regions. We modeled current and future potential distributions of invasive alien plant species using bioclimatic variables in the program Maxent. Our study found that global climate change would not lead to plant invasions in every conservation area, but it would provide the conditions for few invasive plant species to impact conservation areas in some regions. Greenhouse gas concentrations could aggravate the regional invasion of invasive plant species and make larger changes of ability of invasive plant species to invade conservation areas in low gas concentration scenario than high gas concentration scenario. Immediate measures must be taken to deal with this problem, such as developing global indicators of biological invasion and designing long-term management plans at different geographical scales.
To Cite this article:
Wang, C.J., J.Z. Wan and Z.X. Zhang. 2019. Will global climate change facilitate plant invasions in conservation areas? Pak. J. Bot., 51(4): DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.30848/PJB2019-4(6)
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