Spatial patterns and predictors of seed plants' extinction risks in Asian countries

Abstract

Asian countries are experiencing severe biodiversity loss, so it is crucial to develop practical conservation actions and strategies. Threats to species are often dynamic, as their impacts on extinction risk change over time. There is an urgent need to better understand how these factors are interrelated and how they vary spatially with extinction risk. Here, we presented a spatially explicit method to evaluate the dynamic trends and predictors of seed plants' extinction risks across countries, using National Red List data from China, Japan, and Sri Lanka as case studies, by calculating the Red List Index (RLI) and mapping the percentage of seed plants facing increasing risks and pressures. We found overall decrease in extinction risks, however, a substantial number of species, ranging from 328 to 1343 depending on the country, still showed increasing extinction risks. Increasing extinction risks of plants was strongly correlated with changes in threats, such as urban expansion, temperature changes, and tree canopy cover changes, rather than static threat intensity. Specifically, increasing tree canopy cover significantly associated with plant extinction risks in both China and Sri Lanka, where large-scale afforestation and economic forest plantation probably resulted in habitat degradation and species loss. Concerningly, our findings indicated that land-use change was the dominant driver of increased species extinction risk in these two countries, in contrast to climate change in Japan. As governments commit to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, we suggest them to make site-specific or taxa-specific policies to ensure the effectively prevention of biodiversity loss.