Modeling the effects of climate change on the distribution of Acanthalburnus urmianus (Günther, 1899) in Urmia lake basin rivers

According to the reports of the International Panel Climate Change (IPCC) there is no doubt about climate change occurring. All ecosystems on the earth have being concerned by the effects of climate change. Urmia lake basin and its rivers exposed to numerous anthropogenic stressors such as hydrological, morphological, connectivity and water quality pressures. The main objective of this study is to determine the effects of climate change on Acanthalburnus urmianus (Günther, 1899) distribution under optimistic and pessimistic scenarios in 2050 and 2080. For this purpose, Species Distribution Modelling (SDM) method was used. In the beginning, any data related to fish observation as well as environmental variables like elevation, slope, maximum air temperature, range temperature, precipitation and maximum width were collected. And then, with different models including GLM, GAM, GBM, RF, CTA, FDA, MARS, ANN and SRE as well as Ensemble model (in order to reduce the uncertainty), the potential distributions of A. urmianus at the scale of Lake Urmia basin and Iran with above mentioned climatic scenarios were predicted. The results indicated that climate change affects on the distribution of A. urmianus under all optimist and pessimistic scenarios and in contrast to  2050 in both scenarios, reduction in distribution in 2080 was observed.