Climate Change Impacts on Species Composition and Floristic Regions in Thailand

Abstract

Tropical forests are vulnerable to climate change including increased temperatures and changes to rainfall variation. Here, we use Thailand as a case study for assessing the impacts of the shared socio-economic pathway and climate scenarios on changes to the distribution and extent of floristic regions. To address this question, we assigned floristic regions based on a structured cluster analysis of modeled species ranges, and evaluated how those regions respond under scenarios of climate change. A total of 201 plant species with sufficient occurrence data obtained from the systematic forest inventory plots across the country and global datasets were chosen for distribution modeling. Environmental variables, including soils, topography and bioclimatic variables were compiled to model both current and 2050 distributions. Potential floristic regions were classified using a clustering algorithm on the pixel-wise species compositions—resulting in 12 floristic regions representative of both current climate species compositions and projected future species assemblages. Five floristic regions are projected to experience little change in their geographic distribution, while the remainder are projected to be substantially displaced spatially. Additionally, two of the identified floristic regions are not well represented in protected areas—with less than 50% of the current geographic distribution in each region in some form of protected status.