Prediction of suitable habitats for Syzygium caryophyllatum, an endangered medicinal tree by using species distribution modelling for conservation planning

The aim of this study was to use species distribution models (SDMs) to estimate the effects of environmental variables on the habitat suitability of Syzygium caryophyllatum (L.) Alston. SDMs help to identify suitable habitats for the development of threatened plant populations to prevent extinctions, especially in the face of the global environmental change. In the present study three different modelling algorithms were used to predict the habitat suitability of an endangered plant species S. caryophyllatum towards developing conservation strategies. The BIOCLIM, GARP (GARP with the best subsets-new open modeller implementation) and MaxEnt algorithms were run using the Open Modeller Desktop version 1.1.0 software. Jackknife test was used to evaluate the importance of the environmental variables for predictive modelling. Bioclim and GARP models were more accurate with statistically significant AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) values of 0.99 and 0.97 compared to MaxEnt model which showed the AUC value of 0.91. This approach could be promising in predicting the potential habitat suitability of endangered plant species S. caryophyllatum with minimum number of occurrence points and thus, it can be used as an effective tool for species restoration and conservation planning