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

Wei Yang, Yuanxu Ma, Linhai Jing, Siyuan Wang, Zhongchang Sun, Yunwei Tang and Hui Li
Additional contact information
Wei Yang: Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China
Yuanxu Ma: Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China
Linhai Jing: Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China
Siyuan Wang: State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China
Zhongchang Sun: Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China
Yunwei Tang: Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China
Hui Li: Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 9, 1-22

Abstract: 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 identification 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 km 2 in size and will be reduced to 332,544 km 2 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 km 2 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.

Keywords: Asian elephant; MaxEnt; habitat suitability; protected area; climate change; human footprint (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/9/4933/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/9/4933/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:9:p:4933-:d:797802

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().