Effects of climate and land-cover change on the conservation status of gibbons

<strong>Abstract</strong> Species shift their distribution in response to climate and land-cover change, which may result in a spatial mismatch between currently protected areas (PAs) and priority conservation areas (PCAs). We examined the effects of climate and land-cover change on potential range gibbons and sought to identify PCAs that would conserve them effectively. We collected global gibbon occurrence points and modeled (ecological niche model) their current and potential 2050s ranges under climate change and different landcover change scenarios. We examined change in range and PA coverage between the current and future ranges of each gibbon species. We applied spatial conservation prioritization to identify the top 30% PCAs for each species. We then determined how much of the PCAs are conserved in each country within the global range of gibbons. On average 31% (SD 22) of each species’ current range was covered in PAs. Protected-area coverage of the current range of 9 species was &lt;30%. Nine species lost on average 46% (SD 29) of their potential range due to climate change. Under climate change with an optimistic land-cover change scenario (B1), 12 species lost 39% (SD 28) of their range. In a pessimistic land-cover-change scenario (A2), 15 species lost 36% (SD 28) of their range. Five species lost significantly more range under the A2 scenario than the B1 scenario (<em>p</em> = 0.01, SD 0.01), suggesting that gibbons will benefit from effective land-cover management. Protected-area coverage of future range was &lt;30% for 11 species. On average 32% (SD 25) of PCAs was covered by PAs. Indonesia contained more species and PCAs and thus has the greatest responsibility for gibbon conservation. Indonesia, India, and Myanmar need to expand their PAs to fulfill their responsibility to gibbon conservation. Our results provide a baseline for global gibbon conservation, particularly for countries lacking gibbon research capacity. <br> Dataset here: 1 Environmental variables for modeling 2 Potential range for each gibbon (Present-absence Maps) 3 Priority conservation areas (PCAs) maps 4 Gibbon records (a map; All data were obtained from different dataset online) 5 ID from gbif Some of our data were assessed by GBIF using spocc package. We provides the all id in this table. Some of these data were the same but from different resources, like gbif and inatural. User can remove the duplicated records by spocc, sf or other package. <br> Please cites this data by our publication: Yang, Li., Chen, T., Shi, K.-C., Zhang, Lu., Lwin, N., &amp; Fan, P.-F. (2022). Effects of climate and land-cover change on the conservation status of gibbons. <em>Conservation Biology</em>, 00, e14045. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14045 <br> For gbif id table: Derived dataset GBIF.org (15 December 2022) Filtered export of GBIF occurrence data https://doi.org/10.15468/dd.zm2wbc <br> We also thank Daneil Noesgaard for making the derived data from GBIF. <br>