Abstract:The beet webworm, Loxostege sticticalis L. (Lepidoptera: Crambidae) is a destructive insect pest of crops and fodder plants in northern China. The degree of annual outbreaks of the larval population during the breeding season is highly related to the size and location of the overwintering area for hibernating larvae, but how this relationship will change in the future remains unknown. Therefore, variations in the size and location of the overwintering area of L. sticticalis were studied to reveal changes under various scenarios of global climate change. This was accomplished using overwintering data of L. sticticalis in China from 1951 to 2000, combined with the application of the Maxent model and the BCC-CSM1.1 climate change modeling data under four scenarios of RCP, 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5, released by IPCC AR5. Our results showed that the AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) value for the training and test data were 0.989 and 0.987, respectively, indicating the data fit the model very well. In addition, the most important variable in the model as determined by the jackknife test was the variance in the precipitation coefficient (bio_15), followed by precipitation during the wettest month (bio_13), precipitation in October (bio_10), and annual temperature range (bio_7). Their individual contribution to the model was greater than 10% each. Finally, the centroid of the highly suitable overwintering location would be shifted 104.93-207.47 km and 78.79-226.97 km northward, whereas the size of the area would expanded to 1.41-2.00 and 1.94-2.94 fold by the 2050s and 2070s, respectively, compared to those at the present time.