Salamander Diversity and Distributions Data, Central Appalachian Region, West Virginia, USA 

The Central Appalachian region, USA, contains several high elevation-endemic woodland salamanders (genus Plethodon), which are thought to be particularly vulnerable to climate change due to their restricted distributions and low vagility. In West Virginia, there is a strong management focus on protection and recovery of the federally threatened Cheat Mountain salamander (Plethodon nettingi; CMS). To support this focus, there is a need for improved understanding of CMS occurrence-habitat relationships and spatially explicit projections of fine-scale contemporary and potential future habitat quality to inform management actions. In addition, there is concern among resource managers that climate change may increase habitat quality at high elevations for CMS competitors, particularly the eastern red-backed salamander (Plethodon cinereus; RBS), potentially resulting in increased competition pressure for CMS. To address these knowledge gaps, we created ecological niche models for CMS and RBS using the Random Forest classification algorithm and used the estimated occurrence-habitat relationships to assess ecological niche overlap between the species and project fine-scale contemporary and potential future habitat availability and quality. We estimated that the ecological niches of CMS and RBS were 80.5% similar, and habitat projections indicated the species would exhibit opposite responses to climate change in our region. For CMS, we estimated that amount of high-quality habitat will be reduced by mid-century and potentially lost by end-of-century, but that moderate and low-quality habitat will persist. For RBS, we estimated that amount of high-quality habitat will increase through end-of-century, and that high elevations will become more suitable for the species, indicating that competition pressure for CMS is likely to increase. This study improves understanding of important habitat characteristics for CMS and RBS, and our spatially explicit projections can assist natural resource managers with habitat protection actions, species monitoring efforts, and climate change adaptation strategies. 

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The purpose of this study was to improve our understanding of the potential for climate change to influence habitat quality and interspecific competition pressure for the CMS. We used an ecological niche modeling (ENM) approach, which is frequently used for terrestrial species to assess species-habitat relationships and predict the relative quality of habitat within a focal area (Warren and Seifert 2011, Sillero et al. 2021). We estimated the ecological niches for CMS and RBS (within the regional distribution of CMS) based on historical occurrence data, projected their contemporary and potential future geographic distributions based on the modeled environmental relationships and climate projections, and quantified ecological niche overlap between the two species. To our knowledge, this is the first study to use an ENM approach for investigating potential impacts of climate change on interspecific competition pressure between woodland salamanders. 

Data not provided.