Globally, Central Asian wild fruit forests are critical repositories of wild fruit germplasm resources and provide essential ecosystem services. However, their habitats are facing escalating degradation risks driven by climate warming, shifting precipitation regimes, and intensifying anthropogenic disturbances. Accurately quantifying climate-driven spatiotemporal variations in habitat suitability for keystone wild fruit tree species is therefore an essential prerequisite for formulating targeted conservation and management strategies in arid and semi-arid landscapes. In this study, we applied the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) model to simulate the current (2000–2020 baseline) and future (2030s, 2050s, 2070s) potential suitable habitats of two dominant wild fruit tree species, Malus sieversii (Ledeb.) M.Roem. and Prunus cerasifera Ehrh., in the Ili Valley, a core distribution area of Central Asian wild fruit forests in northwestern China. We integrated rigorously screened species occurrence records with key environmental predictors and characterized future climate conditions using three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs; SSP126, SSP245, and SSP585) spanning low to high radiative forcing levels. The model exhibited excellent predictive performance (AUC > 0.85), confirming the robustness and reliability of our habitat suitability simulations. Elevation and annual precipitation were identified as the dominant environmental variables governing habitat suitability for both species, highlighting the critical role of terrain–hydroclimate interactions in maintaining viable dryland refugia for wild fruit forests. Under the baseline climate scenario, the total area of suitable habitats reached 24.014 × 103 km2 for Malus sieversii and 18.990 × 103 km2 for Prunus cerasifera. Future climate projections revealed a consistent and significant contraction trend in suitable habitats for both species, with the magnitude of habitat loss escalating with increasing radiative forcing and longer projection time horizons. Specifically, under the high-emission SSP585 scenario by the 2070s, the suitable habitat area is projected to decline by 7.579 × 103 km2 for Malus sieversii and 9.883 × 103 km2 for Prunus cerasifera relative to the baseline. Our findings delineate climate-vulnerable hotspots of wild fruit forests and provide a robust spatial scientific basis for prioritizing in situ conservation, targeted habitat restoration, and anthropogenic disturbance regulation to support the long-term persistence of these irreplaceable wild fruit germplasm resources under accelerating global climate change.
Liu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.