Climate suitability predictions for the cultivation of macadamia (Macadamia integrifolia) in Malawi using climate change scenarios

environmental layer at a resolution of 5 km x 5 km. At each farm, the Global Position System (GPS) coordinates (in WGS84 datum) were collected using a global position system (Garmin eTrex Vista1 Cx) together with altitude. Additionally, utilizing the approach described by Bar- bet-Massin et al. [33], we generated background pseudo-absence points (Fig 3) to cover any sampling biases in the study. 2.3.Climate data We used bioclimatic predictors (~1970–2000) from WorldClim data set version 1.4 (http:// www.worldclim.org/) at a spatial resolution of ~ 5 km x 5 km to model the current areas suit- able for macadamia in Malawi (the data was clipped to the Malawian country boundary). Cal- culated from monthly temperature and precipitation climatologies, these bioclimatic variables describe spatial variations in annual means, seasonality, and extreme/limiting conditions (S3 Table). We utilized bioclimatic variables derived from 17 GCMs (to reduce the uncertainty inherent within individual GCMs) (S4 Table) based on two RCPs (S5 Table) of climate change for our future predictions [34]. We selected RCP 4.5, which is an intermediate scenario that considers an intermediate greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration and predicts an average Fig 2. a) Average annual temperature (oC) and b) Precipitation (mm) of Malawi based on WorldClim-global climate data. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257007.g002 PLOS ONE Macadamia integrifolia: Climate suitability of Malawi PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257007 September 9, 2021 5 / 20