Identifying the natural reserve area of Cistanche salsa under the effects of multiple host plants and climate change conditions using a maximum entropy model in Xinjiang, China

Cistanche salsa (C. A. Mey.) G. Beck, a holoparasitic desert medicine plant with multiple hosts, is regarded as a potential future desert economic plant. However, as a result of excessive exploitation and poaching, its wild resources have become scarce. Thus, before developing its desert economic value, this plant has to be protected, and the identification of its natural reserve is currently the top priority. However, in previous nature reserve prediction studies, the influence of host plants has been overlooked, particularly in holoparasitic plants with multiple hosts. In this study, we sought to identify the conservation areas of wild C. salsa by considering multiple host–plant interactions and climate change conditions using the MaxEnt model. Additionally, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to reduce the autocorrelation between environmental variables. The effects of the natural distribution of the host plants in terms of natural distribution from the perspective of niche similarities and extrapolation detection were considered by filtering the most influential hosts: Krascheninnikovia ceratoides (Linnaeus), Gueldenstaedt, and Nitraria sibirica Pall. Additionally, the change trends in these hosts based on climate change conditions combined with the change trends in C. salsa were used to identify a core protection area of 126483.5 km2. In this article, we corrected and tried to avoid some of the common mistakes found in species distribution models based on the findings of previous research and fully considered the effects of host plants for multiple-host holoparasitic plants to provide a new perspective on the prediction of holoparasitic plants and to provide scientific zoning for biodiversity conservation in desert ecosystems. This research will hopefully serve as a significant reference for decision-makers.