Impact of climate change on the potential geographical distribution of Ilex paraguariensis

Abstract

We modelled the climatic niche and evaluated the impact of climate changes on the potential geographic distribution of Ilex paraguariensis. This species has high social-cultural, economic and ecological importance in the southern portion of the Atlantic Forest. The occurrence areas were defined by the geographical coordinates of the localities where the species was recorded. Eight climatic variables were obtained from the WorldClim database. The species climatic niche modelling was performed using ten algorithms. The predictions of contemporary and future (2070) areas of climatic suitability were carried out from the consensus of TSS > 0.40 fits. For future predictions, an optimist (RCP4.5) and pessimist (RCP8.5) scenarios were considered, based on the fifth IPCC report. We observed that the species occurs predominantly in the Atlantic Domain. While in the optimistic scenario I. paraguariensis presented a reduction of 65.8% of its area of climatic suitability, in the most pessimistic scenario the reduction reached 82.1%, being the range losses concentrated in peripheral areas of occurrence projections.