ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.

Sec. Sustainable and Intelligent Phytoprotection

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1579546

This article is part of the Research TopicAdvances in Remote Sensing Techniques for Forest Monitoring and AnalysisView all 8 articles

Future climate change will drive expansion of suitable planting areas for Fructus Aurantii in Jiangxi Province, China

Provisionally accepted
Lin  ChenLin ChenXi  GuoXi Guo*Hengyu  ZouHengyu ZouAnfan  ZhuAnfan ZhuXingyu  HuangXingyu Huang
  • Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Fructus Aurantii (FA) is a valuable medicinal material used in traditional China medicine. Predicting the suitable distribution areas of FA and identifying its potential distribution patterns driven by various environmental factors are crucial for the selection of planting sites and maintenance of medicinal quality. Here, the maximum entropy model was used to predict the potential distribution of FA in Jiangxi Province, China under current and future climate conditions. A total of 105 geographical distribution data of FA were collected through field investigation and 32 environmental variables were obtained from public databases. The maximum entropy model showed high prediction accuracy when 16 environmental variables were selected (AUC = 0.932). The habitat suitability of FA was prominently affected by climate, which surpassed topography and soil factors. Maximum temperature of the warmest month, annual temperature range, precipitation of the wettest month, precipitation coefficient of variation, elevation, aspect, and soil organic carbon were the key factors shaping the geographic distribution of FA. Among them, maximum temperature of the warmest month (16.9%), followed by annual temperature range (16.1%), made the greatest contribution to model predictions. In the current climate background, the total potential suitable area for FA covered 6.30 × 10 4 km 2 of garden land. Under future climate warming scenarios (shared socioeconomic pathways 245, 585), the potential suitable area was predicted to move southward and expand twice in 2040-2080, with notable increase in moderately and poorly suitable areas. Low hilly areas at higher elevations with moist cool conditions and gentle undulations would become more suitable for future introduction and planting of FA. Regionalized strategies for different suitable planting areas were proposed taking into account future climate change. All data are available in Mendeley Data (DOI: 10.17632/s9wsnn2xcn.1). Code is available at https://github.com/mrmaxent/Maxent.

Keywords: Fructus aurantii, Future global warming, Southeastern China, MAXENT model, Planting suitability

Received: 19 Feb 2025; Accepted: 14 May 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Chen, Guo, Zou, Zhu and Huang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Xi Guo, Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang, China

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