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Climate change and landscape fragmentation jeopardize the population viability of the Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica)

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Abstract

The Amur tiger, a flagship species of the boreal forest ecosystem in Russian Far East and northeastern China, has declined dramatically in population and geographic distribution due to human caused habitat fragmentation and poaching over the past century. The fate of this largest feline species will also be influenced by the worsening impacts of climate change. In this paper we assess the possible effects of climate change (three scenarios from the 2007 IPCC Report) on the Amur tiger by integrating species distribution modeling (SDM) and population viability analysis (PVA). We projected the potential and realized suitable habitat distributions to examine the impacts from anthropogenic factors, and evaluated the changes of suitable habitat and extinction risk for 100 years under climate change. The realized suitable habitat was projected to be more severely fragmented than the potential suitable habitat because of human-related factors. The potential suitable habitat would expand northward under all climate change scenarios considered. However, the tiger population would suffer the largest decline and highest extinction risk in the next 100 years under the worst climate change scenario (A1B) even though the size of potential habitat would be greatest. Under climate change, the tiger population could persist for the next century only if the size and quality of current habitat patches would remain intact. In addition, our study demonstrated that using SDM alone could grossly overestimate the geographic distribution of the Amur tiger, and that coupling SDM and PVA could provide important insights into conservation planning to mitigate the effects of climate change.

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Acknowledgments

TY thanks Prof. Andrew T. Smith for his guidance during her study as a research scholar at Arizona State University and the Species Distribution Modeling Workshop led by Dr. Richard G. Pearson and Dr. Steven J. Philips. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31300458, 31270567, 31121003, and 31210103911). During the preparation of the paper, TY was also supported by Public Welfare Project from Ministry of Environmental Protection of P. R. China (201209028).

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Science, Beijing, 100012, China

    Yu Tian

  2. School of Life Sciences and Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Jianguo Wu

  3. Center for Human-Environment System Sustainability, State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Jianguo Wu

  4. State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology & School of Life Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Tianming Wang & Jianping Ge

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Tian, Y., Wu, J., Wang, T. et al. Climate change and landscape fragmentation jeopardize the population viability of the Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica). Landscape Ecol 29, 621–637 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-014-0009-z

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