Quantifying the effects of climate and anthropogenic change on regional species loss in China

PLoS One. 2018 Jul 25;13(7):e0199735. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0199735. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Human-induced environmental and climate change are widely blamed for causing rapid global biodiversity loss, but direct estimation of the proportion of biodiversity lost at local or regional scales are still infrequent. This prevents us from quantifying the main and interactive effects of anthropogenic environmental and climate change on species loss. Here, we demonstrate that the estimated proportion of species loss of 252 key protected vertebrate species at a county level of China during the past half century was 27.2% for all taxa, 47.7% for mammals, 28.8% for amphibians and reptiles and 19.8% for birds. Both human population increase and species richness showed significant positive correlations with species loss of all taxa combined, mammals, birds, and amphibians and reptiles. Temperature increase was positively correlated with all-taxa and bird species loss. Precipitation increase was negatively correlated with species loss of birds. Human population change and species richness showed more significant interactions with the other correlates of species loss. High species richness regions had higher species loss under the drivers of human environmental and climate change than low-richness regions. Consequently, ongoing human environmental and climate changes are expected to perpetuate more negative effects on the survival of key vertebrate species, particularly in high-biodiversity regions.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Biomass
  • Biota
  • China
  • Climate Change*
  • Endangered Species / statistics & numerical data*
  • Humans

Grants and funding

Research was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFA0603300), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB31000000), the scientific program of Biological Consequences of Global Change (BCGC) of International Society of Zoological Sciences (ISZS) and International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS), and the 13th Five-year Informatization Plan of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XXH13506).