Fungus under a Changing Climate: Modeling the Current and Future Global Distribution of Fusarium oxysporum Using Geographical Information System Data

Abstract

The impact of climate change on biodiversity has been the subject of numerous research in recent years. The multiple elements of climate change are expected to affect all levels of biodiversity, including microorganisms. The common worldwide fungus Fusarium oxysporum colonizes plant roots as well as soil and several other substrates. It causes predominant vascular wilt disease in different strategic crops such as banana, tomato, palm, and even cotton, thereby leading to severe losses. So, a robust maximum entropy algorithm was implemented in the well-known modeling program Maxent to forecast the current and future global distribution of F. oxysporum under two representative concentration pathways (RCPs 2.6 and 8.5) for 2050 and 2070. The Maxent model was calibrated using 1885 occurrence points. The resulting models were fit with AUC and TSS values equal to 0.9 (±0.001) and 0.7, respectively. Increasing temperatures due to global warming caused differences in habitat suitability between the current and future distributions of F. oxysporum, especially in Europe. The most effective parameter of this fungus distribution was the annual mean temperature (Bio 1); the two-dimensional niche analysis indicated that the fungus has a wide precipitation range because it can live in both dry and rainy habitats as well as a range of temperatures in which it can live to certain limits. The predicted shifts should act as an alarm sign for decision makers, particularly in countries that depend on such staple crops harmed by the fungus.