Understanding how climatic suitability aligns with production potential is essential for site–species matching and regional planning of economically important bamboo species under climate change. This study integrated 132 occurrence records, 95 field-survey plots, the BIOMOD2 ensemble species distribution modelling framework, and the Miami climate-based productivity model to evaluate the current and future habitat suitability, climate-constrained productivity, and planting zoning of Dendrocalamus latiflorus Munro in China. Under the present validation framework, the ensemble model showed high discrimination ability (AUC = 0.979; TSS = 0.908). Variable importance analysis and response curves identified BIO9 and BIO2 as the dominant climatic predictors, with suitability increasing sharply above a lower BIO9 threshold of 10.4 °C but declining under excessive diurnal thermal variation. Under the current climate, highly suitable areas were concentrated in coastal South China, Hainan, Taiwan, and southeastern Yunnan, where suitability broadly overlapped with high climatic productivity (>2250 g C m⁻² yr⁻¹). Coupling suitability with climatic productivity identified a Core planting zone of 33.02 × 10⁴ km², accounting for 71.31% of the climatic production potential within the suitable range. Future projections suggested early- to mid-century expansion of suitable habitat, followed by contraction and fragmentation under stronger late-century warming. Field-based growth analysis further showed that biomass responded more strongly to the suitability gradient than culm height or diameter at breast height, and that growth performance began to converge once predicted suitability exceeded approximately 0.5. Overall, this study provides an integrated framework for linking suitability, climate-constrained productivity, and growth response in D. latiflorus , with direct relevance to industrial bamboo planting evaluation and regional planning under climate change, while highlighting the need for cautious interpretation at local plantation scales.
tao et al. (Tue,) studied this question.