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Dryad

The fate of Meconopsis species in the Tibeto-Himalayan region under future climate change

Cite this dataset

Wang, Wen-Ting; Guo, Wen-Yong; Jarvie, Scott; Svenning, Jens-Christian (2021). The fate of Meconopsis species in the Tibeto-Himalayan region under future climate change [Dataset]. Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.nvx0k6dpx

Abstract

High-mountain areas such as the Tibeto-Himalayan region (THR) host cold-adapted biota expected to be sensitive to anthropogenic climate change. Meconopsis is a representative endangered genus confined to alpine meadow or subnival habitats in the THR. To obtain occurrence data for Meconopsis species found in the THR and adjacent regions, we used records from the Chinese Virtual Herbarium (CVH: http://www.cvh.org.cn/), the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF: http://www.gbif.org/), and the published literature (He et al., 2019). We only used occurrence data collected after 1950, and removed duplicate records found within a 5-kilometer diameter. Our dataset for ten species of Meconopsis are the numbers of records per species ranging from 17 to 228. For these ten Meconopsis species, we identified potential future climate refugia and determined optimal routes for each species to disperse to the proposed refugia.  Our results indicate that for the ten Meconopsis species the regions with low vulnerability to climate change in the THR are the central Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the Hengduan Mountains (HDM), the eastern Himalayas, and the West Qinlin Mountain (WQL), and can be considered potential future climate refugia. Under future climate change, we found for the ten Meconopsis species potential dispersal routes to three of the four identified refugia: the HDM, the eastern Himalayas, and the WQL.  Furthermore, climate change may affect the threat ranking of Red Listed Species for Meconopsis species, as Least Concern species were estimated to become more vulnerable to climate change than the only Near Threatened species.