The projected impact of climate and land use change on plant diversity: An example from West Africa |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Biology Education, Faculty of Science Education, University of Education, Winneba, Ghana;2. Department of Ecology, Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus - Senftenberg, Cottbus 03046, Germany;3. Department of Environmental and Public Health, University of Environment and Sustainable Development, Somanya, Ghana;4. Department of Environmental Science, School of Biological Sciences, College of Agriculture and Natural Sciences, University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana |
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| Abstract: | In West Africa, plant diversity is threatened by future climate and land use change, however, synergistic forecasts for this area are lacking to date. We investigated the impact and the interplay of future (2050) climate and land use change on plant diversity in Burkina Faso, which covers the major bioclimatic gradient in West Africa. Thus, regions with different levels of species richness can be investigated. The LandSHIFT model was adapted for this study to derive novel future (2050) land use simulations. One-class support vector machines (SVMs) were performed with these land use simulations together with current and future (2050) climate projections at a 0.1° resolution. Our modeling results show that the flora of Burkina Faso will be primarily negatively impacted by future climate and land use changes. However, we found contrasting latitudinal patterns. The more humid regions in Southern Burkina Faso would be more affected in terms of species loss than the Sahel. Climate change is more important than land use change under the assumption of technological stagnation in the agricultural sector. Our results suggest that, in general, the plant diversity in dry and humid regions of the tropics might respond differently to climate and land use change. |
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| Keywords: | Biodiversity Burkina Faso Presence-only data Sahel Savanna Species distribution modeling |
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