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Determination of Suitable Regions for Cultivation of Three Medicinal Plants under a Changing Climate

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Abstract

The use of less vulnerable species to climate change such as medicinal plants can be considered as a coping strategy for adapting to climate change. This paper aims to evaluate the suitability of the arable lands located in the Daryache-Namak basin, Iran, for cultivation of several medicinal plants. An approach based on the fuzzy logic was developed that considers potential changes in suitability caused by both climate anomalies and new policies regarding the conflicting water demand. This approach uses different factors, including climate, water availability, soil texture, and salinity to classify the suitability. Monthly outputs of regional climate simulations conducted under the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) program were applied to project the future climate. The results showed that climate anomalies and new policies have led to shifts in the spatial distribution of medicinal plants. For instance, the area of highly suitable lands for cultivating medicinal plants was decreased by 10%. Furthermore, the suitability score of the proposed approach had the largest determination coefficient for yield estimations, mainly due to accounting explicitly for various environmental factors. Based on the field survey, it is revealed that the potentially suitable cultivation regions are highly coincident with the existing cultivated locations. Comparing the different polygons indicated that for marginally and not suitable classes, the contribution of maximum and minimum temperature was increased and decreased, respectively. Similarly, in these two classes, the contribution of water availability would increase.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Asare, the chief of the National Council for Science & Technology Development of Medicinal & Aromatic Plants and Traditional Medicine, for supporting the project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Division of Natural Resources, Agricultural and Natural Resources Research and Education Center, AREEO, Qom, Iran

    Abbas Pourmeidani

  2. Department of Irrigation and Reclamation Engineering, College of Agricultural Engineering and Technology, University of Tehran, Karaj, Iran

    Mahdi Ghamghami & Nozar Ghahreman

  3. Tourism Management, Oxford School of Hospitality Management, Oxford Brookes Business School, Oxford Brookes University, Headington, Oxford, OX3 0BP, UK

    Hossein Olya

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  1. Abbas Pourmeidani
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Correspondence to Mahdi Ghamghami.

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Pourmeidani, A., Ghamghami, M., Olya, H. et al. Determination of Suitable Regions for Cultivation of Three Medicinal Plants under a Changing Climate. Environ. Process. 7, 89–108 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40710-020-00423-w

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