2.3 Climate data
Climate variables used in this study were based on mean annual temperature and precipitation obtained from the Worldclim web portal version 2.1 (Fick & Hijmans, 2017). The variables of Worldclim are raster surfaces derived from the interpolation of weather stations’ data collected across the period 1970-2000. We imported a shapefile of Laos boundaries from the GADM database (version 3.6, https://gadm.org/), the coordinates of sampling sites and the rasters of annual precipitation and mean annual temperature from Worldclim into QGIS v.3.22.7. Then, we extracted temperature and precipitation at each sampling locations as a proxy for the climatic variation that exists across sampling sites distributed all over Laos.