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Predicting the distributions of Egypt's medicinal plants and their potential shifts under future climate change

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...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Kaky, Emad, Gilbert, Francis
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5685616/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29136659
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0187714
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author Kaky, Emad
Gilbert, Francis
author_facet Kaky, Emad
Gilbert, Francis
author_sort Kaky, Emad
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description 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.
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spelling pubmed-56856162017-11-30 Predicting the distributions of Egypt's medicinal plants and their potential shifts under future climate change Kaky, Emad Gilbert, Francis PLoS One Research Article 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. Public Library of Science 2017-11-14 /pmc/articles/PMC5685616/ /pubmed/29136659 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0187714 Text en © 2017 Kaky, Gilbert http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Kaky, Emad
Gilbert, Francis
Predicting the distributions of Egypt's medicinal plants and their potential shifts under future climate change
title Predicting the distributions of Egypt's medicinal plants and their potential shifts under future climate change
title_full Predicting the distributions of Egypt's medicinal plants and their potential shifts under future climate change
title_fullStr Predicting the distributions of Egypt's medicinal plants and their potential shifts under future climate change
title_full_unstemmed Predicting the distributions of Egypt's medicinal plants and their potential shifts under future climate change
title_short Predicting the distributions of Egypt's medicinal plants and their potential shifts under future climate change
title_sort predicting the distributions of egypt's medicinal plants and their potential shifts under future climate change
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5685616/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29136659
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0187714
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