Climate Change Restructures the Suitable Habitat of Bambusa emeiensis in Southwestern China: Disproportionate Core-Habitat Loss and Divergent Centroid Shifts

Bamboo is an ecologically and economically important forest resource in China, and understanding how climate change reshapes bamboo habitat suitability is essential for sustainable cultivation, introduction, and germplasm conservation. Bambusa emeiensis, an accepted bamboo species native to southern China and widely cultivated in southwestern China, has important management and utilization value, yet its future habitat dynamics and the stability of its highly suitable core habitats remain poorly understood. To address this gap, an ensemble species distribution modeling framework based on BIOMOD2 was used to predict the current and future suitable habitats of B. emeiensis under multiple climate scenarios, identify the dominant environmental constraints, and compare shifts between overall suitable habitat and highly suitable core habitat. The ensemble model showed high discrimination capacity under random cross-validation, but its transferability should be interpreted cautiously because occurrence records may be spatially autocorrelated and the projections remain correlative. Annual temperature range, elevation, and precipitation of the warmest quarter emerged as the strongest statistical predictors of distribution. Under the current climate, suitable habitats were concentrated in southwestern China, especially in the transitional zone spanning southern Sichuan, southwestern Chongqing, and northern Guizhou. Across all six future scenarios examined, the total suitable area declined relative to the current climate, with reductions ranging from about 25% under SSP3-7.0–2090s to more than 50% under SSP5-8.5–2050s, and highly suitable core habitat contracted even more strongly (by 41–95% across scenarios). In addition, centroid shifts of overall suitable habitat were not always synchronized with those of highly suitable core habitat, suggesting that climate change may reorganize not only habitat extent, but also the internal spatial arrangement of optimal environments. These findings indicate that the future management of B. emeiensis should prioritize the persistence, connectivity, and managed directional relocation of core habitats rather than relying solely on changes in total suitable area.