An endemic vascular plant species for Turkey, Ferulago humilis Boiss., and its potential distribution areas

Abstract

Turkey is expected to be affected considerably in future adverse climatic conditions. Plant species are one of the most vulnerable to these climatic changes. In this study, we aimed to investigate current and future potential distribution areas of Ferulago humilis Boiss., which is an endemic vascular plant species for Turkey, using CMIP5 projected to year 2070. For this purpose, we obtained occurence data (presence-only) from Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Regarding bioclimatic data we used WorldClim dataset with 10 km2 resolution. Using both plant occurrence and bioclimatic data, we performed species distribution modelling analysis. We used two methods namely Boosted Regression Trees (BRT) and Random Forest (RF). Additionally, we used bootstrapping method as partitioning resampling for all analysis. Our analysis has showed that potential distribution areas of the species has slightly changed for the future projection. The species movement is towards slightly upwards as higher latitudes. We believe that our study shows the importance and relevance of the endemic species in the scope of species distribution models for plant conservation topics.