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.