Protected areas are a globally accepted strategy for lowering the extinction risks of species. They play a crucial role in minimizing habitat loss and maintaining sustainable population levels of species. Although the extent of protected areas have largely increased since the Earth Summit in 1992, they are still insufficient in addressing the current biodiversity crisis. One of the biggest challenges for expanding protected areas is to select the right areas for conservation, as studies have shown that merely fulfilling the quantitative target is less effective for overall biodiversity conservation. Additionally, human pressure and climate change are two important global challenges that pose immense threat to biodiversity. Therefore, it is imperative to consider biodiversity value (i.e. number of threatened species) within protected lands together with the dynamics of climate change and anthropogenic pressure to identify vulnerable areas that require immediate conservation attention. In order to gauze the vulnerabilities of protected lands; we developed a novel framework to quantify the level of threat in over 2500 protected areas in China incorporating three dimensions: species vulnerability, anthropogenic vulnerability and climate vulnerability. We classified these protected areas into different threat categories according to their vulnerability scores and identified areas that require the highest conservation attention.
Interestingly, the species vulnerability hotspots (SVH) were found to have higher climate change since the 1960s compared to species vulnerability coldspots (SVC), which indicates that the SVH have remained climatically unstable since the past. This is very concerning from a conservation perspective, as climate is likely to change at the observed pace. These findings suggest that habitat loss due to increased anthropogenic pressure could likely be a major threat to species in most protected areas in China. The findings have important implications for maximizing the efficiency of global protected areas in the future. The framework is also useful for evaluating the vulnerability of global protected lands and for selecting resilient areas for expanding protected areas coverage to meet the post-2020 global biodiversity target.
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