Effects of climate change on threatened Spanish medicinal and aromatic species: predicting future trends and defining conservation guidelines

Abstract

Climate change will impact several ecosystems, and the resilience of the weakest links of the ecological networks may be decisive in maintaining the ecological structure. The assessment of tendencies in the distribution and resilience of endangered medicinal species against global change can be an excellent tool to predict and minimize future negative effects, even more so if we consider that these species may be useful to us. Spain is one of the richest countries in plant diversity along the Mediterranean basin, and many representatives of the Spanish flora are medicinal plants. Under scenarios of climate change, the distribution ranges of many of these species are likely to alter. In this paper we used ecological niche modeling to predict future changes in the distribution of 41 medicinal plants included in the 2013 assessment of threatened species in Spain. We generated climate-based niche models for each medicinal species and projected them for each decade from 2010 until 2080. Our results identified and prioritized the most vulnerable species and areas to future predicted changes. These results should be useful for conservation planning and especially for prioritizing areas for protection.

Keywords:

• climate change
• medicinal and aromatic plants
• ecological niche modeling
• extent of occurrence
• threatened plants

Acknowledgments

We thank Jordi López Pujol for his invitation to contribute to this special issue of Israel Journal of Plant Sciences. The authors acknowledge the collaboration and comments of Manuel Pardo during the analysis and preparation of this manuscript. The authors also thank the Ministry of Environment technicians for the use of unpublished data. JCMS contributes to the Remedinal3 (S2013/MAE-2719) network of the Madrid region. This article is based on a technical unpublished document delivered in 2013: Report on Targets 2 and 7 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation in relation to the Spanish vascular flora (MAGRAMA, 24 pp).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

PMR was funded by the BBSRC-Interdisciplinary Bioscience DTP Program during the preparation of this paper. DD is supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Portuguese Fundaçao para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (D85SFRH/BPD/100384/2014)D86.