Seria Bowdichia virgilioides uma importante aliada da restauração florestal em cenários de mudança climática?

Abstract

The forests play an important role in minimizing the negative impacts of global warming. Brazil plans to reforest 12 million hectares (29 million acres) of native vegetation by 2030. However, selecting species for reforestation programs becomes a challenge in climate change. Based on this problem, we propose employing species distribution modeling to indirectly assess the effect of climate change on the distribution of a species with potential use for reforestation in Brazil. We used Bowdichia virgilioides Kunth. (Fabaceae), a relevant tree with a wide variety of timber and non timber forest products, as a case study to assess the ability of species to tolerate predicted changes and indicate the most suitable areas for restoration purposes. We evaluated the response of this species to climate change with the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) approach, predicting its distribution in current and future (2070) Periods. We used two atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6): MRI-ESM2-0 and MIROC-ES2 L, following by the emission scenarios: SSP1-2.6; SSP2-4.5; SSP3-7.0; SSP5-8.5. The models were evaluated by the AUC index (area under the curve) and the Boyce index. The model presented an AUC index equal to 0.839 and a Boyce index equal to 0.972, indicating a good fit of the model used. The predicted climate suitability model for the current period corroborated with and the species' known distribution, showing that the most suitable climatic for the species comprises two Brazilian hotspots, Cerrado and Atlantic Forest. Comparing the prediction of the present with the predictive model of the future, there was an expansion of the area of high climatic suitability for the Amazon biome. In addition, the species tends to tolerate climate changes predicted for the north of the Cerrado and Atlantic Forest. Therefore, the results of this study suggest that the potential distribution of B. virgilioides will change, but there will be no significant reduction in the area of climate included. In this sense, the species can be used in ecological restoration in eastern Amazonia and northern Cerrado and Atlantic Forest. This case study highlights the utility of species distribution modeling to optimize the choice of species suitable in each biome according to current and future climate scenarios.