CURRENT GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF SALVIA ARISTATA (LAMIACEAE), PREDICTION OF ITS FUTURE DISTRIBUTION BASED ON CLIMATICAL DATA; A GUIDE FOR ITS CONSERVATION

The current global climate change is a big challenge for biodiversity. Efforts on monitoring biodiversity and conservation is more effective by having information about species spatial distribution. Development in computational model provide new opportunity for botanist to integrate herbarium specimen’s records with evolutionary and ecological data which are so crucial for biodiversity. Salvia aristata Auch. ex Benth (Lamiaceae) is an Irano-Turanian endemic species restricted to western, northwest and center of Iran along with few records from eastern parts of Turkey. In this study, we applied ecological niche modeling with emphasizing on climate data to infer S. aristata distribution in the past, present and future. Our niche model produced good results with high performance based on Area Under Curve (AUC>0.9). Altitude was the most important variable contributing in niche models of S. aristata. The last glacial model showed that S. aristata had more restricted niches during Last Glacial Maximum than its current distributions. Also, our future niche model showed that the suitable area of S. aristata will be decreased in 60 years.