Legacies of historical and current climates in spatial distribution of forests diseases and insect pests

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Fei-Xue Zhang, Qian Wang, Ji-Zhong Wan and Chun-Jing Wang, State Key Laboratory of Plateau Ecology and Agriculture, Qinghai University, Xining, China

Background/Question/Methods
Biological disasters caused by harmful species have a high potential to threaten forest ecosystems being operational on regional to global scales. Such events may destroy China's forest resources and affect global forestry ecological construction while the key factors affecting the distribution of harmful species have not been identified. To develop effective biological control methods, we obtained 68218 geographical records of 754 species in China from the open-access database and the species were divided into three groups: animals, plants, and fungi. Additional information included four sets of past and current climate variables (annual mean temperature, temperature seasonality, annual precipitation, precipitation seasonality) and five terrain variables (elevation, roughness, terrain position index, terrain roughness index, and vector ruggedness measure). These geographical records were used to model harmful species distributions under the maximum entropy algorithm (MaxEnt) based on climate and terrain variables. The contribution rate of variables and the response curve of species by MaxEnt indicated that the key environmental variables were annual mean temperature and annual precipitation for the distributions of harmful species.
Results/Conclusions
The results showed that the last glacial maximum had a greater impact on the distributions of harmful species, and the historical annual precipitation and the current annual mean temperature had a significant impact on the distribution of harmful species. The historical annual precipitation and the current annual mean temperature had the most obvious impact on harmful plant species distributions. Specifically speaking, the current climate factors, the impact on the distribution of Curculio chinensis was the most significant, and the trend of the response curve of the species rose and then fell, indicating that there was a suitable range in the climate variables for the species to grow. The annual mean temperature and annual precipitation were important climatic factors causing changes in the geographical distribution of harmful species. We provide new evidence on the legacies of historical and current climates in harmful species distributions that contribute to the mechanism of species distribution patterns. Our analysis has great ecological significance for the prevention and control of harmful species, to avoid secondary damage to forestry construction, to restore the self-regulation function of the forest itself, to protect natural resources, and to restore forest habitats.