Future distribution of the prickly pear cacti Opuntia ficus-indica in the United States and Mexico

Background/Question/Methods

Opuntia ficus-indica, is an important annual cash crop for the Mexican industry and also some areas in the United States such as California . It has many historical and cultural aspects, in addition to being a potentially important species in the nutritional and alternative medical fields. Global change could disrupt the current distribution of this species in both the United States and Mexico. To forecast the future distribution of this species, we used the maximum entropy method, nineteen bioclimatic variables from WorldClim, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) scenario A1B for the year 2050, the Canadian model (Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis), and the Australian model (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization). We evaluated the methods using the Area Under the Curve (AUC) in a ROC plot. A hundred models were developed dividing training and testing data in 70% and 30% respectively to evaluate the models. The final outputs were the average model and AUC.

Results/Conclusions

All models had AUC > than 0.9. Both CCCMA and CSIRO projections for 2050 provide evidence that the suitable habitat for the species Opuntia ficus-indica will shift, finding suitable habitat in California but have a considerable decrease in the states of Arizona, New Mexico, west Texas, and states along the Gulf coast. In the country of Mexico, both projections illustrate a decrease in suitable habitat for the states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, and states along the Pacific coast. While the areas of Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, and San Luis Potosi display an increase of suitable habitat. It is important to monitor Opuntia ficus-indica because of the high economical impact it has in both the Mexican and American industries.