Planning priority conservation areas for biodiversity under climate change in topographically complex areas: A case study in Sichuan province, China

RESEARCH ARTICLE Planning priority conservation areas for biodiversity under climate change in topographically complex areas: A case study in Sichuan province, China Yafeng Lu1, Pei Xu1*, Qinwen Li1, Yukuan Wang1, Cheng Wu2 1 Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Ministry of Water Resources, Chengdu, China, 2 Power China Kunming Engineering Corporation Limited, Kuming, China * xupei@imde.ac.cn Abstract Identifying priority conservation areas plays a significant role in conserving biodiversity under climate change, but uncertainties create challenges for conservation planning. To reduce uncertainties in the conservation planning framework, we developed an adaptation index to assess the effect of topographic complexity on species adaptation to climate change, which was incorporated into the conservation framework as conservation costs. Meanwhile, the species distributions were predicted by the Maxent model, and the priority conservation areas were optimized during different periods in Sichuan province by the Marxan model. Our results showed that the effect of topographic complexity was critical for species adaptation, but the adaptation index decreased with the temperature increase. Based on the conservation targets and costs, the distributions of priority conservation areas were mainly concentrated in mountainous areas around the Sichuan Basin where may be robust to the adaptation to climate change. In the future, the distributions of priority conser- vation areas had no evident changes, accounting for about 26% and 28% of the study

areas. Moreover, most species habitats could be conserved in terms of conservation targets in these priority conservation areas. Therefore, our approach could achieve biodiversity con- servation goals and be highly practical. More importantly, quantifying the effect of topogra- phy also is critical for options for planning conservation areas in response to climate change. 1. Introduction Climate change is widely believed to be the threatening factor of biodiversity, resulting in shifts in distributions, phenology, and behaviors [1–4]. Moreover, the existing conservation system may be ineffective when the species migrated out of nature reserves for adaption climate change. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report, the future climate will change more rapidly, thus the impacts would be magnified con- sequently [5]. Although expended conservation areas and planning new priority conservation PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243425 December 23, 2020 1 / 15 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Lu Y, Xu P, Li Q, Wang Y, Wu C (2020) Planning priority conservation areas for biodiversity under climate change in topographically complex areas: A case study in Sichuan province, China. PLoS ONE 15(12): e0243425. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0243425 Editor: Lyi Mingyang, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research Chinese Academy of Sciences, CHINA Received: November 17, 2020 Accepted: November 22, 2020 Published: December 23, 2020

Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243425 Copyright: © 2020 Lu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.