Abstract
Algeria has long suffered from ongoing desertification, resulting in the progressive loss of vegetation and soil erosion. This has had a severe impact on rural livelihoods in the north, making local communities more vulnerable and causing a decline in biodiversity. In an attempt to counter these trends, the Green Dam initiative was launched to establish a forest belt to mitigate desertification in the arid zone from east to west across Algeria. Unfortunately the project has faced failures as monocultures of P. halepensis Mill. experienced parasitic outbreaks and struggled to grow. Our study aimed to identify alternative tree species suitable for the climatic conditions in northern Algeria. We evaluated 20 woody species native to North Africa, projecting their potential distributions using MaxEnt 3.4 software under the current climate and two future climate scenarios (SSP 370, SSP 585). The environmental data was collected from the CHELSA database and the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 3.70 and 5.85 were used. Based on these projections, we partitioned the Green Dam into three regions, Southern, Eastern and Northern. The regions were delineated by species predicted to perform well under both current and future conditions. We recommend two species for afforestation across the entire Green Dam: Juniperus oxycedrus L. and Pistacia lentiscus L. A risk assessment indicated that the Green Dam region is highly susceptible to wildfire due to elevated temperatures and low precipitation. Given these conditions, we also recommend planting Pistacia atlantica Desf. (Atlas pistachio), a species with reduced flammability. Incorporating the Atlas pistachio alongside region-specific species is expected to enhance habitat diversity and reduce overall wildfire risk.
Funding
This work was partially financially supported by the National Science Centre of Poland (project number: 2023/51/B/NZ8/00839), the University of Life Sciences (MD) and the Institute of Dendrology, the Polish Academy of Sciences (ŁW).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Ethics, Consent to Participate, and Consent to Publish declarations: not applicable.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Supplementary Material 1 (download DOCX )
Supplementary Material 2 (download PDF )
Supplementary Material 3 (download TIFF )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Taib, A., Dering, M. & Walas, Ł. Modelling resilient species for the restoration of the Green Dam in Algeria.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-68343-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-68343-7
Keywords
- Green Dam
- Desertification
- Niche modelling
- North Africa
Source: Ecology - nature.com
