Prediction of the potentially suitable areas of Ligularia virgaurea and Ligularia sagitta on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau based on future climate change using the MaxEnt model.

and are two species of poisonous plants with strong invasiveness in natural grasslands in China that have caused considerable harm to animal husbandry and the ecological environment. However, little is known about their suitable habitats and the key environmental factors affecting their distribution. Although some studies have reported the distributions of poisonous plants on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) and predicted their potential distributions at local scales in some regions under climate change, there have been few studies on the widespread distributions of and . In this study, we recorded 276 and 118 occurrence points of and on the QTP using GPS, and then used the MaxEnt model to predict the distribution of suitable habitats. Results showed that (1) under current climate conditions, and are mainly distributed in southern Gansu, eastern Qinghai, northwestern Sichuan, eastern Tibet, and southwestern Yunnan, accounting for approximately 34.9% and 39.8% of the total area of the QTP, respectively; (2) the main environmental variables affecting the distribution of suitable habitats for and are the Human Footprint Index (52.8%, 42.2%), elevation (11%, 4.4%), soil total nitrogen (18.9%, 4.2%), and precipitation seasonality (5.1%, 7.3%); and (3) in the future, in the 2050s and 2070s, the area of habitat of intermediate suitability for will spread considerably in northwest Sichuan, while that of high suitability for will spread to eastern Tibet and western Sichuan.