Shifting ecological niches of agricultural Prunus species under climate change

Abstract Climate change is strongly impacting agriculture, reducing crop production and shifting the geographic distribution of suitable areas for crop cultivation. To safeguard future global yield and feed a growing world population, the migration of crop production areas to new suitable sites represents a way to adapt to a changing climate. Here, we aim to identify the ecological niche of agricultural Prunus species, namely peach, plum, almond, apricot and sweet cherry, and examine their expected future shifts under climate change. For each of the five species, we selected from the literature processed-based phenological models for dormancy break, blooming and fruit ripening, whose fulfillment determines whether an area is suitable for crop cultivation. We simulated the current pheno-suitability across Europe and validated the estimated niches with occurrence data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. We then implemented the phenological models to predict potential shifts in the suitablity niches under future climate change scenarios. Historically, the ecological niche of Prunus species spans mid-low European latitudes, while higher latitudes fail to satify the forcing requirements for blooming and fruit ripening. In the future, this constraint is expected to become less restrictive with a northwards expansion of the suitable areas. However, this will be contrasted by a contraction of the niche at low latitudes due to dormancy break failures. While bridging established mechanistic knowledge on the climatic effects of plant phenological traits with citizen science observations, our work brings new insights into how fruit crops will respond to global warming.