Vulnerability of protected areas to future climate change, land use modification, and biological invasions in China

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change, land use modifications, and alien species invasions are major threats to global biodiversity. Protected areas (PAs) are regarded as the cornerstone of biodiversity conservation, however, few studies have quantified the vulnerability of PAs to these global change factors together. Here, we overlay the risks of climate change, land use change, and alien vertebrate establishment within boundaries of a total of 1020 PAs with different administrative levels in China to quantify their vulnerabilities. Our results show that 56.6% of PAs will face at least one stress factor, and 21 PAs are threatened under the highest risk with three stressors simultaneously. PAs designed for forest conservation in Southwest and South China are most sensitive to the three global change factors. In addition, wildlife and wetland PAs are predicted to mainly experience climate change and high land use anthropogenetic modifications, and many wildlife PAs can also provide suitable habitats for alien vertebrate establishment. Our study highlights the urgent need for proactive conservation and management planning of Chinese PAs by considering different global change factors together.

Multi-Factor Collaborative Analysis of Conservation Effectiveness of Nature Reserves Based on Remote Sensing Data and Google Earth Engine

“…Under climate change, predicting and assessing the receptivity of different ecosystems to alien organisms provides a basis for vulnerability assessments and adaptive strategy development. Additionally, concrete assessments of native species in PAs of varying ecosystems are needed to identify highly vulnerable species within different PA types, enabling timely targeted translocation [33]. Furthermore, our research found that both core and buffer zones of both PAs also experienced varying degrees of anthropogenic disturbance, although impacts were smaller in core zones.…”

“…The studied wetland PA and forest PA require different management measures. Wetlands have higher sensitivity and require strict protection measures and proposing ecological restoration projects [33], while also needing more proactive restoration measures to improve degraded forests. Comparative results show management plans must consider the unique ecological characteristics, species compositions, and ecological functions of each ecosystem.…”

“…These represent the innovations in our research ideology and analytical methodology. Thus far, many appraisals of conservation effectiveness have focused solely on either a single category of PA [21,29] or involved a plethora of disparate PA categories [19,[30][31][32][33][34]. Therefore, our study aims to analyze differences in the effects of various PA types through a comparative analysis of two major types (forest and wetland PAs).…”

Perspectives of invasive alien species management in China

“…Despite this, the risk has not been evaluated under current and future global change scenarios. Xin et al (2023) applied ecological niche modeling to investigate the risk of alien vertebrate establishment and overlapped the predicted habitat suitability with climate change and land‐use modifications in a total of 1020 terrestrial PAs with clear geographic boundaries and varying functions in China. Their findings indicated that more than half of the PAs were predicted to face at least one stress factor, and specifically many wildlife conservation PAs could provide suitable habitats for the establishment of feral populations of alien vertebrate species, emphasizing the need for early prevention schemes in PAs with high invasion potentials.…”