Differential Impacts of Climatic and Land Use Changes on Habitat Suitability and Protected Area Adequacy across the Asian Elephant’s Range

Climate change and human activities have caused dramatic impacts on biodiversity. Although a number of international agreements or initiatives have been launched to mitigate the biodiversity loss, the erosion of terrestrial biome habitats is inevitable. Consequently, the identifica-tion of potential...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jing, L. (Author), Li, H. (Author), Ma, Y. (Author), Sun, Z. (Author), Tang, Y. (Author), Wang, S. (Author), Yang, W. (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
LEADER 02538nam a2200277Ia 4500
001 10.3390-su14094933
008 220517s2022 CNT 000 0 und d
020 |a 20711050 (ISSN) 
245 1 0 |a Differential Impacts of Climatic and Land Use Changes on Habitat Suitability and Protected Area Adequacy across the Asian Elephant’s Range 
260 0 |b MDPI  |c 2022 
856 |z View Fulltext in Publisher  |u https://doi.org/10.3390/su14094933 
520 3 |a Climate change and human activities have caused dramatic impacts on biodiversity. Although a number of international agreements or initiatives have been launched to mitigate the biodiversity loss, the erosion of terrestrial biome habitats is inevitable. Consequently, the identifica-tion of potential suitable habitats under climate change and human disturbance has become an urgent task of biodiversity conservation. In this study, we used the maximum entropy model (MaxEnt) to identify the current and potential future habitats of Asian elephants in South and Southeast Asia. We performed analyses for future projections with 17 scenarios using the present results as baseline. To optimize the modelling results, we delineated the core habitats by using the Core Mapper Tool and compared them with existing protected areas (PAs) through gap analysis. The results showed that the current total area of core habitats is 491,455 km2 in size and will be reduced to 332,544 km2 by 2090 under SSP585 (the shared socioeconomic pathway). The projection analysis under differential scenarios suggested that most of the core habitats in the current protected areas would remain stable and suitable for elephants in the future. However, the remaining 75.17% of the core habitats lay outside the current PAs, and finally we mapped approximately 219,545 km2 of suitable habitats as priority protected areas in the future. Although our model did not perform well in some regions, our analyses and findings still could provide useful references to the planning of protected areas and conservation of Asian elephant. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. 
650 0 4 |a Asian elephant 
650 0 4 |a climate change 
650 0 4 |a habitat suitability 
650 0 4 |a human footprint 
650 0 4 |a MaxEnt 
650 0 4 |a protected area 
700 1 |a Jing, L.  |e author 
700 1 |a Li, H.  |e author 
700 1 |a Ma, Y.  |e author 
700 1 |a Sun, Z.  |e author 
700 1 |a Tang, Y.  |e author 
700 1 |a Wang, S.  |e author 
700 1 |a Yang, W.  |e author 
773 |t Sustainability (Switzerland)