Kaky Emad, Gilbert Francis
School of Life Sciences, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom.
Kalar Technical Institute, Sulaimani Polytechnic University, Sulaymaniyah, Iraq.
PLoS One. 2017 Nov 14;12(11):e0187714. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0187714. eCollection 2017.
Climate change is one of the most difficult of challenges to conserving biodiversity, especially for countries with few data on the distributions of their taxa. Species distribution modelling is a modern approach to the assessment of the potential effects of climate change on biodiversity, with the great advantage of being robust to small amounts of data. Taking advantage of a recently validated dataset, we use the medicinal plants of Egypt to identify hotspots of diversity now and in the future by predicting the effect of climate change on the pattern of species richness using species distribution modelling. Then we assess how Egypt's current Protected Area network is likely to perform in protecting plants under climate change. The patterns of species richness show that in most cases the A2a 'business as usual' scenario was more harmful than the B2a 'moderate mitigation' scenario. Predicted species richness inside Protected Areas was higher than outside under all scenarios, indicating that Egypt's PAs are well placed to help conserve medicinal plants.
气候变化是保护生物多样性面临的最艰巨挑战之一，对于那些缺乏其生物分类群分布数据的国家而言尤其如此。物种分布建模是评估气候变化对生物多样性潜在影响的一种现代方法，其巨大优势在于对少量数据具有稳健性。利用最近经过验证的数据集，我们通过物种分布建模预测气候变化对物种丰富度格局的影响，从而利用埃及的药用植物来确定当前和未来的多样性热点。然后，我们评估埃及目前的保护区网络在气候变化下保护植物方面可能发挥的作用。物种丰富度格局表明，在大多数情况下，A2a“照常行事”情景比B2a“适度缓解”情景更具危害性。在所有情景下，保护区内预测的物种丰富度均高于保护区外，这表明埃及的保护区在帮助保护药用植物方面具有良好的条件。
