earticle

영어

Climate change and invasive alien plant species (IAPs) are having a significant impact on mountain ecosystems. The combination of climate change and socio-economic development is exacerbating the invasion of IAPs, which are a major threat to biodiversity loss and ecosystem functioning. Species distribution modelling has become an important tool in predicting the invasion or suitability probability under climate change based on occurrence data and environmental variables. MaxEnt modelling was applied to predict the current suitable distribution of most noxious weed A. adenophora (Spreng) R. King and H. Robinson and analysed the changes in distribution with the use of current (year 2000) environmental variables and future (year 2050) climatic scenarios consisting of 3 representative concentration pathways (RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) in Bhutan. Species occurrence data was collected from the region of interest along the road side using GPS handset. The model performance of both current and future climatic scenario was moderate in performance with mean temperature of wettest quarter being the most important variable that contributed in model fit. The study shows that current climatic condition favours the A. adenophora for its invasion and RCP 2.6 climatic scenario would promote aggression of invasion as compared to RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 climatic scenarios. This can lead to characterization of the species as preferring moderate change in climatic conditions to be invasive, while extreme conditions can inhibit its invasiveness. This study can serve as reference point for the conservation and management strategies in control of this species and further research.