Abstract
Nature reserves are widely considered as one available strategy for protecting biodiversity, which is threatened by habitat fragmentation, and wildlife extinction. The Chinese government has established a goal of protecting 15% of its land area by 2015. We quantitated the characteristics and distribution of nature reserves in mainland China and evaluated the expansion process for national nature reserves. National nature reserves occupy 64.15% of the total area of nature reserves. Steppe and meadow ecosystem, ocean and seacoast ecosystem, and wild plant nature reserves represent lower percentages, particularly in national nature reserves, in which they comprised 0.76%, 0.54%, and 0.69%, respectively, of the area. Furthermore, medium and small nature reserves compose 92.32% of all nature reserves. The land area under any legal protection has reached 14.80%, although only 9.78% is strictly protected. However, if 9 super-large national nature reserves, located in Southwest and Northwest China were removed, the percentage of strictly protected area decreases to 2.66% of the land area of China. The areas contained in nature reserves in each province are not proportional to the areas of the provinces, particularly for national nature reserves, with higher protection rates in Southwest and Northwest China than in other regions. Of the 31 provinces, 22 provinces feature strict protection of less than 4% of their areas by national nature reserves; these provinces are mainly located in East, Central, South, and North China. Moreover, the unevenness indexes of the distribution of nature reserves and national nature reserves are 0.39 and 0.58, respectively. The construction of nature reserves has entered a steady development stage after a period of rapid expansion in mainland China. In recent years, the total area of national nature reserves has increased slowly, while the total area of nature reserves has not increased, although the number of nature reserves continues increase.
Highlights
Natural ecosystems destruction, wildlife extinction, and habitat fragmentation have increased seriously since the 19th century, due to rapid population growth, the expansion of human activities and the accelerating use of natural resources [1,2,3,4,5,6]
How close are we to achieving this goal? How do the proportions of protected area vary among different regions and categories? Here, we present results on the structure of nature reserves (NRs) and a comprehensive assessment of the areas protected within various administrative regions in mainland China
We developed an unevenness index of the spatial distribution of NRs (E) based on the Gini coefficient, which was proposed as a measure of inequality of income or wealth [34,35,36], as follows: E
Summary
Wildlife extinction, and habitat fragmentation have increased seriously since the 19th century, due to rapid population growth, the expansion of human activities and the accelerating use of natural resources [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Global interest in biodiversity conservation has increased [7,8,9]. Protected areas (PAs) are one available strategy for PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0119650. Establishment of Nature Reserves protecting biodiversity and natural ecosystems [8], [10,11,12,13]. Protected areas covered approximately 13% of global land area by 2010 [8], [16]. The 2010 biodiversity target to effectively preserve “at least 10% of each ecological region” is far from accomplished, resulting from the preference of PAs in high elevation, low productivity ecosystems, or biodiversity hotspots, etc [8], [16], [17]
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