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.