Conservation Challenges and Opportunities for Fokienia hodginsii in the Wuyi Mountains Under Climate Change and Human...

Fokienia hodginsii (Dunn) A. Henry & H. H. Thomas, as an evergreen Tertiary relic conifer species of great ornamental, medical, and ecological value, has not been fully explored in terms of its risk associated with distribution under climate change scenarios. The Wuyi Mountains region is of exceptional ecological significance and provides important habitats for F. hodginsii. We compared four species distribution models (SDMs): Maximum Entropy Model (MaxEnt), random forest (RF), boosted regression tree (BRT), and generalized linear model (GLM) using climate variables, alongside soil variables and human footprint index, and used the best to make a comprehensive assessment of F. hodginsii's environmental suitability under shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) 126 and 585. Our results indicate that MaxEnt model provided the best discriminative power and prediction accuracy in species distribution predictions, with Area Under Curve (AUC) value of 0.973, True Skill Statistic (TSS) value of 0.704, and Kappa of 0.395. We found that climate variables played the dominant role in shaping the distribution of F. hodginsii and accounted for 90.9% of the permutation importance. Furthermore, an overall trend of shrinking distribution was predicted for F. hodginsii, and it would face a huge loss of 97.6% suitable habitat under the scenario of SSP585. These findings indicate a potential loss of economic and ecological value of F. hodginsii, highlighting the risks posed to forest ecosystems in the Wuyi Mountains and underscoring the need for comprehensive conservation strategies to protect the species along with the economic benefits it provides.