Prdedicting the impacts of climate change on the distribution of Capoeta buhsei Kessler, 1877 in the inland water of Iran

Climate change is one of the most important threats to biodiversity. Despite many studies on the impacts of climate change on terrestrial species in Iran such as; reptiles, birds and mammals, very little is known about the impacts of climate change on aquatic species. Species distribution models (SDMs) are commonly applied tools for assessing the potential impact of climate change on biodiversity. In the present study, we used Maxent model and predicted the impacts of climate change on the distribution of an endemic freshwater fish in Iran, the Namak scraper, Capoeta buhsei. The Namak scraper is a species of ray-finned fish in the family Cyprinidae. Distribution records were collected through observations during fieldwork from 2010 to 2017 and downloaded from online databases. Climatic data obtained from WorldClim (http://www.worldclim.org/). Model performance was assessed using the Area Under the Curve (AUC) metric of the Receiving Operator Characteristic (ROC) curve. The ROC plot was created by selecting 80% of the data for training and 20% for testing. The model performed well, with an Area Under the Curve (AUC) metric of 0.97 for training and 0.91 for test data. Our results showed that the species will lose 58 percent of its current suitable range under climate change (Based on CCSM4 under RCP 8.5 for 2070). Thus, climate change will have strong negative impacts on this species

کلیدواژه ها:

Capoeta buhsei ، Climate change ، Distribution modeling ، Conservation