Ecol Appl. 2015 Jan;25(1):24-38. doi: 10.1890/13-1499.1.
Climate change has significant impacts on species' distributions and diversity patterns. Understanding range shifts and changes in richness gradients under climate change is crucial for conservation. The Tibetan Plateau, home to wild yak, chiru, and kiang, contains a biome with many endemic ungulates. It is highly sensitive to climate change and a region that merits particular attention with regard to the impacts of global climate change on its biomes. Maximum entropy approaches were used to estimate current and future potential distributions, in response to climate change, for 22 ungulate species. We used three general circulation (MK3, HADCM3, MIROC3_2-MED) and three emissions scenarios (Bl, A1B, A2) to derive estimated future measurements of 14 environmental variables over three time periods (2020, 2050, 2080), and then modeled species distributions using these predicted environmental measurements for each time period under two dispersal hypotheses (full and zero, respectively). This resulted in a total of 6160 prediction models. We found that these ungulates, on average, may lose 30-50% of their distributional areas, depending on the dispersal scenarios. In addition, 55-68% of the ungulate species were predicted to become locally endangered under the different dispersal assumptions, 23-32% to become locally critically endangered, and 4-7 endemic species to become globally endangered. Furthermore, ungulate species ranges may experience average poleward shifts of ~300 km. We also predict west-to-east reductions in species richness: southeastern mountainous areas currently have the highest species richness, but are predicted to face the greatest diversity losses, whereas the northern areas are predicted to see increasing numbers of ungulate species in the 21st century. Our study indicates much more severe range reductions of ungulates on the Tibetan Plateau than those anticipated elsewhere in the world, and species richness patterns will change dramatically with climate change. For conservation, we suggest (1) securing existing protected areas, and (2) establishing new nature reserves to counterbalance climate change impacts.
气候变化对物种的分布和多样性模式有着重大影响。了解物种在气候变化下的分布范围变化和丰富度梯度变化，对于保护至关重要。青藏高原是野牦牛、藏羚和野驴的栖息地，拥有许多特有的有蹄类动物生物群落。该地区对气候变化高度敏感，是全球气候变化对其生物群落影响值得特别关注的地区。我们使用最大熵方法来估计 22 种有蹄类物种在应对气候变化时的当前和未来潜在分布。我们使用了三种通用环流模型（MK3、HADCM3、MIROC3_2-MED）和三种排放情景（B1、A1B、A2），来获得三个时间段（2020 年、2050 年、2080 年）未来的 14 个环境变量的预估测量值，然后使用这些预测的环境测量值，在两种扩散假设下（分别为完全和零），为每个时间段的物种分布建模。这产生了总共 6160 个预测模型。我们发现，这些有蹄类动物的分布面积可能平均减少 30-50%，这取决于扩散情景。此外，在不同的扩散假设下，55-68%的有蹄类物种预计将成为局部濒危物种，23-32%的物种预计将成为局部极危物种，4-7 种特有物种将成为全球濒危物种。此外，有蹄类动物的分布范围可能会出现平均向极地方向的 300 公里的转移。我们还预测了物种丰富度的东西向减少：目前东南山区的物种丰富度最高，但预计会面临最大的多样性损失，而北部地区在 21 世纪预计会有更多的有蹄类物种。我们的研究表明，青藏高原上的有蹄类动物的分布范围减少比世界其他地区预计的要严重得多，而且随着气候变化，物种丰富度模式将发生巨大变化。为了保护，我们建议：（1）保护现有的保护区；（2）建立新的自然保护区，以应对气候变化的影响。
