Abstract Detail

Lightning Talks – Germinating Ideas

Scheppler, Hannah [1], Moore, Rich [2].

A climatic niche model of wild Carica papaya and its relationship to farm yields and non-native establishment.

Wild relatives of domesticated crops are a source of beneficial traits used in crop improvement. Carica papaya is a staple crop throughout the globe, domesticated from wild relatives native to Central America. We used maximum entropy-based environmental niche modeling to determine the bioclimatic aspects of wild papaya’s niche and compared models to regions of known farmed areas and areas where papaya has invaded outside its native range. A simpler model employing non-covariate predictors was used to identify the main aspects of wild papaya’s climatic niche while a more complex model, including all 19 bioclimatic predictors, was utilized to make predictions to new environments. The strongest predictors were determined based on permutation importance and non-uniformity of response curves. The niche of papaya was represented by mean temperature of warmest quarter, minimum temperature of coldest month, mean temperature of driest quarter, annual mean temperature, precipitation of coldest quarter, and precipitation of driest quarter. Models were overall consistent with known farmed areas, and generally correlated with farm yield, supporting the utility of the model. However, in some regions, low crop yields were sometimes associated with moderate suitability, likely due to sampling bias toward lower-yielding farms. We also compared predictions to known invasions, and results were consistent with regions of high suitability supporting non-native establishment, except for one invasion in Texas. These results can be used to identify locations where papaya farms may be successful, assess risk of non-native establishment, and identify under-sampled areas for biological studies.

1 - Ohio State University, College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, 2120 Fyffe Road, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA
2 - Miami University, Biology Department, 212 Pearson Hall, 700 E. High St., Oxford, OH, 45056, United States

Keywords:
invasive species
crop
Wild relatives
Species Distribution Modeling
Climatic niche.

Presentation Type: Germinating Ideas Lightning Talk
Number: LT2007
Abstract ID:210
Candidate for Awards:None