Uncertainty and risk of pruned distributional ranges induced by climate shifts for alpine species: a case study for 79 Kobresia species in China.

There is an urgent need to determine the risk of the reduction in distributional ranges of alpine graminoid species induced by rapid warming, as they are adapted to the cold conditions of mountain areas. Here, taking 79 Kobresia species as a case, with the fuzzy set-based classification method, Monte Carlo scheme, and scenarios data of climate shifts, I identified the uncertainty of climate-induced range shifts of Kobresia species, and recognized which species would be in high danger of shrinking their ranges to critical sizes. Deterministic and stochastic scenarios of climate change would result in their output for the majority of the species but were consistent for at least two species. In deterministic scenarios, compared with the baseline conditions, the richness of 79 species was higher in several sites in Northeast and West China and lower in certain sites in Southwest China. In addition, the richness of studied species that over 80% of their existing ranges reduced was about 2–5, while 75–78 species would occupy over 80% of their total ranges. In stochastic scenarios, with a probability above 0.6, around 10–11% of species would have more than 80% of their existing ranges pruned, and approximately 12–19% of species would lose more than 80% of their total ranges, around 40% of the 79 species would be at risk of extinction due to climate change. The risks were mainly caused by changes in the temperature index. These species will need adaptation measures to cope with future climatic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]