The Impact of climate change on the natural range of Faidherbia Albida

Author

Gopo, Nerissa

Title

The Impact of climate change on the natural range of Faidherbia Albida

Abstract

In Africa, trees both inside and outside of forests help to ensure food security and rocketing soil richness in the face of climatic change and fluctuations. As a part of farming livelihoods, they additionally offer social and environmental benefits. In various regions of Africa, distinct ecological and socioeconomic circumstances have given rise to particular types of agroforestry. The effectiveness of global programs on addressing climate change adaptation and mitigation can be increased by explicitly include agroforestry and integrating agriculture and forestry objectives. For the contributions to this special issue, we highlight the significance of F. albida in curbing food insecurity and soil infertility through agroforestry. Climate change is now a major environmental concern at a global level, impacting the distribution and composition of species. By anticipating the spread of various species, climate change models have evolved into a crucial tool for guiding biodiversity protection. Finding out how climate change is affecting F. albida in Southern Africa was the aim of this study. The maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) method of the R programming language was used to predict how widely spread will F. albida be in Southern Africa. 19 bioclimatic variables and 278 occurrence reports were used to simulate the species' range. Two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), namelyRCP_8.5 and RCP_2.6, were used to forecast distributions for the years 25 and 27. The current protrusion shown a reduction in the range of F. albida and the potential for occurrence outside the area of current existence was above .2. Under two climatic scenarios, the future ecological niche models for F. albida predicted considerable changes in the current suitability. All of the scenarios showed a significant range reduction, demonstrating that climate change has a significant effect on the survival of F. albida, with the eventual loss of biodiversity as a result. F. albida is one of the well-known species whose extinction is foreseen by hard climatic circumstances in accordance with our findings, particularly under the intense scenario (RCP_8.5). Continuous monitoring in this area is necessary to ascertain the size of F. albida's range since the predicted suitability regions in this study can help in assessing the conservation status of tree species at a regional level.

Date

May 2023

Publisher

BUSE

Keywords

Climate change

Forest

Natural range

Supervisor

Prof. L. Jimu