Impact of climate change on the potential global prevalence of (Tassi) Goid. under several climatological scenarios.

INTRODUCTION

Climate change forms one of the most dangerous problems that disturb the earth today. It not only devastates the environment but also affects the biodiversity of living organisms, including fungi. (Tassi) Goid. is one of the most pervasive and destructive soil-borne fungus that threatens food security, so predicting its current and future distribution will aid in following its emergence in new regions and taking precautionary measures to control it.

METHODS

Throughout this work, there are about 324 records of were used to model its global prevalence using 19 environmental covariates under several climate change scenarios for analysis. Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) model was used to predict the spatial distribution of this fungus throughout the world while algorithms of DIVA-GIS were chosen to confirm the predicted model.

RESULTS

Based on the Jackknife test, minimum temperature of coldest month (bio_6) represented the most effective bioclimatological parameter to fungus distribution with a 52.5% contribution. Two representative concentration pathways (RCPs) 2.6 and 8.5 of global climate model (GCM) code MG, were used to forecast the global spreading of the fungus in 2050 and 2070. The area under curve (AUC) and true skill statistics (TSS) were assigned to evaluate the resulted models with values equal to 0.902 ± 0.009 and 0.8, respectively. These values indicated a satisfactory significant correlation between the models and the ecology of the fungus. Two-dimensional niche analysis illustrated that the fungus could adapt to a wide range of temperatures (9 °C to 28 °C), and its annual rainfall ranges from 0 mm to 2000 mm. In the future, Africa will become the low habitat suitability for the fungus while Europe will become a good place for its distribution.

DISCUSSION

The MaxEnt model is potentially useful for predicting the future distribution of under changing climate, but the results need further intensive evaluation including more ecological parameters other than bioclimatological data.