Climate-driven redistribution of global Haloxylon Bunge habitat revealed by ensemble species distribution models: Implications for dryland restoration indicators

Haloxylon Bunge is a key restoration genus in drylands because it supports windbreak formation, sand fixation, and carbon sequestration. However, ongoing warming may reshape its habitat suitability across the global dryland belt. Here, we used Biomod2 to model global habitat suitability of Haloxylon under four CMIP6 climate scenarios (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0, and SSP5-8.5) across the 2030s, 2050s, 2070s, and 2090s. Under the historical baseline, suitable habitat covered 7.79 & times; 106 km2 and extended mainly from North Africa through the Middle East and Central Asia to north-western China. The dominant environmental controls were precipitation of the warmest quarter, UV-B seasonality, and temperature seasonality, contributing 33.82%, 14.14%, and 6.21%, respectively. Across all future scenario-period combinations, suitable area declined to 6.37-7.57 & times; 106 km2, equivalent to losses of 2.74%-18.22% relative to the baseline. This pattern indicates a persistent contraction of climatically suitable habitat, with larger declines generally occurring under higher-emission pathways. Low-suitability habitat changed little, whereas moderate-and high-suitability habitats declined consistently. Stable suitable and stable unsuitable areas dominated future change dynamics, while contractions were concentrated along the margins of the Sahara-Arabian region, the Iranian Plateau, and the Indo-Pakistan drylands. The suitability centroid remained within the Iranian Plateau, with a maximum net shift of 281.64 km, indicating regional redistribution within the existing dryland belt rather than large-scale geographic relocation. These findings show that future climate change will affect Haloxylon primarily through overall range contraction, erosion of higher-quality habitat and internal spatial reorganization within its current dryland distribution. This spatially explicit framework can help identify stable core areas, track vulnerable margins and cautiously assess frontier zones for future restoration and climate-adaptive planning.