Evaluation of Habitat Suitability for Asian Elephants in Sipsongpanna under Climate Change by Coupling Multi-Source Remote Sensing Products with MaxEnt Model

Abstract

The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus Linnaeus) is a globally endangered species, an internationally protected species, and a first-class protected animal in China. However, future climate change and human activities exacerbate the instability of its habitat range, leading to a possible reduction in the range. By using multi-source remote sensing data and products, as well as climate change models, including ASTER GDEM v3, Landsat8 OLI image and ClimateAP, we examined the effects of ecological factors related to climate and natural and anthropogenic influences on the distribution of Asian elephants in Sipsongpanna. Multiyear elephant field tracking data were used with a MaxEnt species distribution model and the climate model. First, the distribution of Asian elephants in potentially suitable areas in Sipsongpanna was simulated under current climatic conditions without considering human activities. The predicted distribution was verified by existing Asian elephant migration trajectories. Subsequently, the distribution of potentially suitable areas for Asian elephants in Sipsongpanna was simulated under two climate change scenarios (RCP4.5, RCP8.5) in three periods (2025, 2055, and 2085). The changes in potentially suitable areas for Asian elephants in Sipsongpanna were analyzed under multiple climate change scenarios for the current (2017) and different future periods by considering the effects of human activities. The results show the following: (1) under anthropogenic interference (AI), the optimal MaxEnt model has a high prediction accuracy with the area under the curve (AUC) of 0.913. The feature combination (FC) includes linear, quadratic, and threshold features, and the regularization multiplier (RM) is 2.1. (2) Jackknife analyses of the non-anthropogenic interference (NAI) and anthropogenic interference (AI) scenarios indicate that topography (altitude (Alt)), temperature (mean warmest month temperature (MWMT)), and precipitation (mean annual precipitation (MAP)) are the top three factors influencing the distribution of Asian elephants. (3) The total area suitable for Asian elephants under current climate conditions and AI accounts for 46.35% of the total area. Areas of high suitability (occurrence probability >0.5) are located in Jinghong City in central Sipsongpanna and Mengla County in southeastern Sipsongpanna. Among them, the minimum habitat range and ecological corridors are mainly located in Mengman Town, Mohan Town, Mengla Town, Mengban Township, Dadugang Township, and Mengwang Township. (4) The change in potentially suitable areas for Asian elephants between current and future conditions is small under AI and large under undisturbed conditions.