Optimized Plant Diversity and Carbon Storage for Priority Protection Areas in China

Abstract

Biodiversity and carbon storage are two key ecosystem functions that are crucial to protect and maintain ecosystem balance. However, there is often little overlap between hotspots for these two different conservation purposes. Additionally, it is not well understood how these different spatial metrics affect these functions in protected ecosystems in China. Here, we explored the relationships between plant diversity metrics and carbon storage by using a large vascular plant distribution dataset, as well as soil fragile organic carbon and biomass carbon datasets in specific spatial areas across China. We also defined priority protection areas (PPAs) using a conservation prioritization method, where 30% of the study areas displayed the highest combined conservation value in carbon storage and plant species richness (SR), phylogenetic diversity (PD), phylogenetic endemism (PE) and evolutionary distinctness (ED). Our results indicated that the correlations between biodiversity metrics and carbon storage were very weak in spatial relationship. However, by including both of these functions in conservation targets, the PPAs could account for more than 95% of the species and evolutionary diversity (PD, ED), and stored large amounts of carbon. Additionally, we broadly divided the PPAs into win–win, high plant diversity, and high carbon areas based on the overlap of biodiversity and carbon storage hotspots. Altogether, our results highlight the importance of understanding and optimizing conservation efforts for different ecosystem functions in different PPAs. Ultimately, this work establishes an urgent need to expand protection in these areas to support mutual biodiversity and carbon storage beneficial solutions.