Species Distribution Modelling of Family Sapindaceae in West Africa

Members of the family Sapindaceae provides various benefits in combating increasing malnutrition and poverty in West Africa. Due to their multiple uses, their high nutritional and medicinal value, members of Sapindaceae have been identified as one of the most important forest species to be conserved and valued in Africa. Therefore, it is important to study the potential future distribution of this species and determine strategies for conservation. In order to achieve these, suitability of sites in Africa was evaluated for potential conservation using spatial environmental data in MAXENT modelling framework. A total of 153 geo-referenced records of Sapindaceae were assembled from herbarium records and fieldwork and climatic data were acquired from the Worldclim Database. The main variables that contributed towards predicting the species distribution were annual precipitation and temperature seasonality. Results suggest that the distribution model was excellent with training AUC value of 0.974 and test AUC value of 0.960 confirming the wide distribution of Sapindaceae in West Africa. Also, the environmental variables that affected the model the most are minimum temperature of the coldest month (35.4%), precipitation of the coldest quarter (16.9%) and precipitation of wettest month (14.9%). Recommendations for different conservation strategies include in situ conservation in Protected Areas; ex situ conservation in seed banks and conservation through ‘sustainable utilization’.