Abstract Climate change may disrupt the spatial matching of interacting species, thus compromise the persistence of species. Giant pandas form specialized trophic interactions with bamboo, and empirical evidence indicated that climate in panda distribution range has warmed during the past half-century. A critical effort to reduce giant panda extinction risk is to measure the stability state of panda-bamboo and detect the trends of recent change. However, most studies projected what would happen only for a single component of the panda-bamboo system under future climate scenarios. Little has been known about whether climate warming has decoupled spatial matching between giant panda and bamboo. Here, we investigated the spatial matching between giant panda and bamboo, and explored the extent to which the panda thermally suitable habitats shifted and fragmented over the past half-century. We found that giant pandas gained 4750 km2 of thermally suitable areas. However, the thermally suitable habitat shrank by 8.2%, and the thermally suitable habitat patches became smaller and more exposed to the forest edge, resulting in 41.1% decline of metapopulation capacity, which indicated that giant pandas were facing high risks of habitat fragmentation. The protected thermally suitable habitat increased by 3.5 times from 1980 to 2010. In contrast to the habitat fragmentation outside nature reserves, the nature reserves have mitigated the habitat loss and fragmentation for giant pandas. Our findings suggested that conservation effort to reduce giant panda extinction risk should focus on maintaining spatial matching between panda and bamboo in the face of future climate change.

中文翻译：

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气候引起的空间错配可能加剧大熊猫栖息地的丧失和破碎化

摘要 气候变化可能会破坏相互作用物种的空间匹配，从而损害物种的持久性。大熊猫与竹子形成特殊的营养相互作用，经验证据表明，在过去的半个世纪里，大熊猫分布范围内的气候已经变暖。降低大熊猫灭绝风险的一项关键工作是测量熊猫竹的稳定状态并检测近期变化的趋势。然而，大多数研究预测了在未来气候情景下，熊猫-竹系统的一个组成部分会发生什么。关于气候变暖是否使大熊猫和竹子之间的空间匹配脱钩，人们知之甚少。在这里，我们研究了大熊猫和竹子之间的空间匹配，并探索了过去半个世纪大熊猫适宜热栖息地的变化和破碎程度。我们发现大熊猫获得了 4750 平方公里的热适宜区域。但热适宜栖息地缩小了8.2%，热适宜栖息地斑块变小且更多地暴露于森林边缘，导致复合种群能力下降41.1%，表明大熊猫面临栖息地破碎化的高风险。从 1980 年到 2010 年，受保护的热适宜栖息地增加了 3.5 倍。与自然保护区外的栖息地破碎化相比，自然保护区减轻了大熊猫栖息地的丧失和破碎化。