5. CONCLUSION AND PERSPECTIVES
This study assessed the potential impacts of climate variations on
environments suitability for Kersting’s groundnut cultivation, and
consequently its distribution around four West-African countries. The
use of Maxent’ models and genetic information allowed a preliminary
understanding of the stress factors influencing the climate suitability
of the species and genetic populations under future scenarios (2055,
RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). The overall trend shown by our results indicates an
increase in climate suitability for the species cultivation in the
Northern-Guinean zone of Southern Benin and Togo, the Northern-Sudanian
and Southern-Sudanian zones of Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo and Northern
Benin. A decrease was observed in the Southern-Sudanian zones of the
Central Benin, which is the major production area. Our findings
illustrate also that projected areas of environments cultivability forM. geocarpum and the two populations are on different climate
change trajectories. The projected distribution maps presented in this
paper have been hence, used to identify strategic measures to manage the
impacts of reduced climate cultivability while taking advantage of the
opportunities in areas of improved suitability for Kersting’s groundnut
cultivation in the future. Our findings could be downscaled to a country
level to assist national policy makers in developing of strategic
control initiatives to prevent the scarcity of this legume.
Although this study represents a first insight into the examining the
potential of Kersting’s groundnut as resilient crop under climate
change, several limitations are to be noted in order to develop the
right tools to reduce model uncertainty and make better predictions in
future research. First, the global distribution of the species and its
wild relatives is still incompletely documented online: collecting more
and finer occurrence data, especially in regions where its production
was previously reported would greatly help in refining or confirming our
results. Second, our models identified rainfall, temperature and soil
variables that contributed significantly to their fits. However,
socioeconomic factors such as local market value of the species and
cultural preferences must also be considered in the predictions.
Combining also measures of key phenotypic traits in modeling process
would contribute to improve predictions of the impact of climate change
on this legume crop. Third, the non-availability of whole genome-wide
data in the case of Kersting’s groundnut limited access to phylogenetic
information and identification of key functional genes for various
important phenotypic traits. That may provide means to assess response
of key functional genes under evolutionary climate change.
Nevertheless, using our approach, we identified species, genetic
populations and cultivable areas for further germplasm collecting to
enhance available germplasm and better direct Kersting’s groundnut
breeding priorities in the future.