2.5 Core distributional shifts
Under current and future climate circumstances, the SDM toolbox was used
to calculate shifting trends in the area of suitable habitat based on
Python, as well as changes in the centroid of the area of suitable
habitat (Etherington, 2011). The toolbox is a Python-based GIS
application (Brown et al., 2017). Using the toolbox, the researchers
calculated shifting trends in areas of suitable habitats and compared
the centroids of the regions between current and future climate
conditions. The study provides information about the core shifts and
distributions of S. ciliatum , S. nepalense , and S.
yunnanense . These species’ distributional changes were reduced to a
single centroid (central) point, and a vector file was constructed to
show the amount and direction of expected change over time. Finally, we
examined how the centroid changed with different SDMs to determine
whether there were any distribution shifts.