PJB-2021-353
Predicting impacts of climate change on distribution of alligator weed Alternanthera philoxeroides in China
Li Hong-Qun, Sun Xie-Ping, Zhang Yan, Xing Li-Gang and Liu Xiao-Mei
Abstract
To understand the relationship between the alligator weed’s potential distribution and environment variables, its potential distribution was analyzed by the Maxent model under the current and future environmental conditions. The results showed that model performances are highly accurate in predicating its potential distribution in model training and testing. The dominate factors were precipitation of the driest month, temperature seasonality, altitude and precipitation of the wettest month, with thresholds of 20-110 mm, 550-925, <200 m and 160-300 mm respectively, indicating that the alligator weed is suitable for the water-land interface of various freshwater ecosystems in tropical to warm temperate regions. Its suitable geographic distributions are mainly distributed on eastern, southern, central, southwestern China, and south of Shaanxi and Hebei provinces. With climate change, its suitable distributions areas will first increase and then decrease from now to the 2070s, however the total suitable area increases relative to that in the current conditions. To 2050s, the increased suitable areas are southwestern Shandong and southern Hebei provinces, southwestern Yunnan province, and Nyingchi in Tibet, while to 2070s only in the southwest of Shandong province. Therefore, the current suitable habitats should be given highly attention to prevent from its spreading to these above three increased suitable and adjacent areas (western Sichuan, southeastern Gansu, southern Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces). Taken together, these informations from this study should be a useful guide for management of the species
To Cite this article:
Hong-Qun, Li., S. Xie-Ping, Z. Yan, X. Li-Gang and L. Xiao-Mei. 2023. Predicting impacts of climate change on distribution of alligator weed Alternanthera philoxeroides in China. Pak. J. Bot., 55(1): DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.30848/PJB2023-1(15)
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