Ecological niche modeling of the endemic South American palm Butia yatay

SILVA, GISELLA CAROLINA; SOLIS NEFFA, VIVIANA GRISELDA; HENRIK BALSLEV

Río de Janeiro

Simposio; 7th World Palm Symposium; 2021

Butia yatay is an endemic South American palm that occurs in areas with a warm-rainy climate and it is mostly restricted to sandy and rocky soils. Butia yatay has a neotropical distribution and grows associated with flora from the Chaco domain. In the open grasslands and savannas of northeastern Argentina and western Uruguay, B. yatay displays complex spatial patterns and generally grows in groups, conforming palm groves with different densities and ages. Furthemore, both paleobotanical information and historical records have shown a greater presence and distribution of B. yatay in the past. The continuous reduction of its range has been linked to the harvest of adult palms for different purposes, including the allocation of land to agriculture and livestock production. Moreover, it has been suggested that, on a larger time scale, possible climatic changes may also have favored the retraction of B. yatay palm groves. Thus, in this study we present the spatial distribution of B. yatay at different time scales based in 100 occurrence accessions from Argentina and Uruguay, and we build species distribution models using Maxent software with two groups of predictor variables: climatic and non-climatic environmental. The results obtained allows us to understand the response of populations to historical and current landscape change processes, as well as to assess the impact of climate change and future land use/cover.