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

areas have been proposed as a strategy for conservation and management [6], planning results are difficult to accept for implementation due to uncertainties in climate change and their impacts. Currently, developing a comprehensive conservation planning framework to reduce uncertainties may be a significant prerequisite for species conservation under climate change. As researchers have recognized the urgency to identify conservation areas for adaptation climate change, conservation planning tools have developed from qualitative to quantitative techniques [7]. Linking species distribution models (SDMs) and conservation planning models have shown better performance, such as the Maxent model and Marxan model, while their chances were also taken into account identifying priority conservation areas under climate change [8, 9]. The previous studies suggested that SDMs were the foundation of planning pri- ority conservation areas to figure out where the protection was the most needed [10]. Mean- while, several studies indicated that the shortcomings in SDMs have been investigated and concerned, leading to inherent uncertainties in identifying priority conservation areas [11, 12]. Due to incomplete knowledge of biodiversity adaptation for climate change, the issues could not fully be eliminated by improving models. Topographic complexity plays a significant role in biodiversity conservation, which may be a vital factor to reduce uncertainties in planning priority conservation areas [13, 14]. On one hand,

topographic complexity supports the diversity of the habitats, which increases the likelihood that the species could disperse suitable habitats with similar climate conditions [15, 16]. Beier sug- gested that topographic complexity, as an important part of conservation targets, should be con- served in conservation planning [17]. One the other hand, the topographic complexity reduces the human disturbances so that the adaptive capacity of species could enhance under climate change. Williams et al. suggested that the microclimatic buffering of climate change can enhance biodiversity adaptation under climate change [18]. Although previous studies have considered the topographic complexity as well as highlighted the influence of topographic complexity on uncertainties, it is difficult to achieve biodiversity conservation via conserving landscape hetero- geneity because species distributions were not entirely consistent with topography diversity. Given those mentioned issues, this paper aims to develop a framework to plan priority con- servation areas for addressing climate change. Specifically, this study will focus on (1) predict- ing species distributions under climate change; (2) developing an approach to quantify the effect of topographic complexity on adaptation; and (3) incorporating climate change informa- tion, biological information, topographic information into planning priority conservation areas to reduce uncertainties. 2. Materials and methods 2.1. Study area Sichuan Province, which is the core area of the Yangtze River as well as one of the top ten land

ecological security barriers in southwestern China (Fig 1), is rich in biodiversity [19]. The southwestern area of Sichuan Province belongs to the Hengduan Mountain which is one of the world’s 24 biodiversity hotspots [20]. It has more than 10,000 alpine plant species and 1,200 vertebrate species. Meanwhile, Sichuan’s biodiversity richness has aroused wide attention. Since the 1960s, the Chinese government has established more than 160 nature reserves with a total area of 8.91 million hectares, accounting for 18.3% of Sichuan’s land area. In general, the temperature in the area is decreasing from the east to the west. According to meteorological data, the annual average temperature in Sichuan Province increased by 0.44˚C for the period 1961–2010, which has kept increase since 1996. Meanwhile, the Sichuan province is particu- larly vulnerable to climate extremes, such as droughts, cold temperatures, and heatwaves [21, 22]. However, the habitats of species may be changed due to climate change. These nature 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 2 / 15 Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This work was supported by a Youth Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/) Project Grant (41701114) and by the West Light Foundation of The Chinese Academy of Sciences (http://www.

cas.cn) Project Grant (Y7R280080) to Yafeng Lu, Pei Xu, Yukuan Wang. Additionally, the General Program of Beijing Natural Science Foundation (http://kw.beijing.gov.cn/) Project Grant (8182018) provided support in the form of salary for authors [Qinwen Li and Cheng Wu]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: NO authors have competing interests