Table 1.
Characteristic species of the dry deciduous forest on hillsides of southwestern Ecuador.
Fig 1.
Environmental space extent during modeling.
Gridded area represents the geographical space, (i.e., input data) used to run the models. Provinces located in the Amazon region were excluded as well as major islands. Shaded gray area illustrates the bioclimatic demarcation of xeric environments from the Ministry of Environment of Ecuador [13], which to the West encompasses different forests types, including the totality of the Ecuadorian dry forests and a fraction of the Tumbes–Piura dry forests.
Table 2.
Environmental variables considered in species distribution modeling.
Table 3.
Correlation matrix of predictor variables.
Table 4.
Average model AUC values.
Fig 2.
Stacked model projections of 17 characteristic trees species of Ecuadorian dry deciduous forests.
Potential species presence was based on 2014 native forest remnants. Low, moderate, and high species overlaps represent 1–6, 7–12, and 13–17 species, respectively. Pattern fill illustrates the natural areas protected by the Ministry of Environment of Ecuador [13], excluding strictly maritime areas, mangroves, and recreational areas, as well as private protected areas. Numbered regions highlight the protected areas within the dry deciduous forest (1. Reserva Ecologica Arenillas, 2. Parque Nacional Machalilla, and 3. Refugio de Vida Silvestre Pacoche). Enlarged image on the right emphasizes potential species overlap in southwestern Ecuador.
Fig 3.
Potential distribution areas for Albizia multiflora.
The map on the left shows the species model for continental Ecuador, while the enlarged map on the right highlights species presence calculations in southwestern Ecuador. Green, black, and gray colors represent areas of remnant native forest, areas lost to deforestation, and remnant forest areas threatened by climate change, respectively.
Table 5.
Annual landscape change attributed to deforestation and climate change.
Fig 4.
Vectors depicting the core distributional shifts of characteristic tree species in the Ecuadorian dry deciduous forest.
Solid black lines show the change in the centroid of distribution after deforestation (2008–2014) and dashed gray lines represent the projected change under the future climate scenario CCSM4.0, RCP 8.5 (2014–2050). Climate change vector lengths were adjusted to show the same time interval as deforestation (i.e., 6 years). White lines denote country borders, and numbers > 100 represent altitude of contour lines in meters.