A bird's view of new conservation hotspots in China

Abstract

Blooming citizen science in China creates opportunities to update distribution maps of threatened birds and contributes to decision making for conservation. 46,073 records submitted by over 7000 bird watchers from 1998 to 2013 in China cover 1195 of 1371 species and all provincial administrative districts in the country. We extracted 13,181 occurrence localities for 95 threatened species defined by the IUCN Red List and 239 national protected species in China. By applying these data in MaxEnt model, we identified new conservation hotspots for threatened birds in China in coastal regions of the Bohai Gulf and the Yellow Sea, the south of the North China Plain, and the lower reach of the Yangtze River. These new conservation hotpots are not included in the global biodiversity hotspots, and not all represented in the priority regions in National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP). These newly identified conservation hotspots are seriously under-protected: only less than 2% of them are in national nature reserves. There is a long way to go to meet the Aichi targets, a plan to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2020.