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

results showed that most species could achieve default conservation targets for climate change, indicating that our results are more supportive of biodiversity conservation for climate change. 4. Discussion 4.1. The impacts of climate change on biodiversity conservation Evaluating the impact of climate change on biodiversity is the core of planning priority conser- vation areas. As climate change is a significant driver of species distributions, most sensitive species change their distributions in the future. This is because all suitable areas could not be occupied under current climatic conditions due to biological limitations, including competi- tion, and dispersal [41]. In our results, the changes in climate change may be sufficient to reshape the pattern of species distributions [42–44], while most species would expand their distributions. The previous studies have been pointed out sharply that the distribution of the current conservation network may no longer protect all targeting species, although these reserves were originally planned for climate change [9, 15, 16, 45]. Similar to these studies, our results suggested that current protected areas normally would not maintain all habitats for bio- diversity. Thus, identifying larger conservation areas is complementary to enhance adaptation for climate change. Meanwhile, larger conservation areas reduce the impacts of human activi- ties, which can help species in response to adverse environmental conditions. However, uncertainties in projecting climate change and predicting species distributions

are difficult to eliminate. We also found that some species cannot move to suitable climatic conditions for adaptation due to current land use. Besides, there were time lags in the responses of biodiversity to climate change in practice. Despite these limitations, the Maxent model could reveal the impacts of climate change on biodiversity in the study areas as well as provide the estimated species’ persistence within conservation areas [46]. 4.2. The effect of topographic complexity on adaptation to climate change As the topographic position index may be a useful element for link habitats and topography, the diversity of topographic position stands for habitats’ richness for adaptation to climate Fig 6. The distributions of priority conservation areas for climate change (a and b represent the priority conservation areas for the period of 2011–2040, and 2031–2060). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243425.g006 PLOS ONE Planning priority conservation areas for biodiversity under climate change in topographically complex areas PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243425 December 23, 2020 10 / 15