Top priority crop wild relatives exhibit different resilience responses to climate change in Benin (West Africa)

Abstract

Climate change exacerbates biodiversity loss and contributes to disrupting ecosystem functioning, diminishing ecosystem services, and further endangering vulnerable populations of species. This study explores how different climate scenarios may impede the probable resilience of top-priority crop wild relatives in Benin. Records of the species were combined with climate and soil layers, in a maximum entropy modeling algorithm. For the future models, two shared socio-economic trajectories were considered: Shared Socioeconomic Pathway SSP2-4.5 and Shared Socioeconomic Pathway SSP5-8.5 from the CMPI6 scenarios for the period 2040–2070. Niche dynamics as well as similarity of the niches were assessed for all species for the proposition of sustainable conservation strategies. Results showed that all models yielded very good performance, as revealed by the AUC and TSS values. For most species, much of the distribution will remain stable across time, though some expansion or retraction will be observed in some cases. Most of the pairs of species display low similarity in the suitable areas for conservation. However, a higher similarity of the background was observed among some groups including Ipomoea and Dioscorea species. Further development of these models could help to get a complete view of the distribution of the species and set long-term conservation strategies for this group.