Red list of China's forest ecosystems: A conservation assessment and protected area gap analysis

Current biodiversity loss is far greater than at any time in human history. As complementary tool to prioritize biodiversity for conservation, the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) is well justified as a conservation tool. Although China's biodiversity is among the world's richest, a significant part of this diversity is under threat. Based on the distribution of 229 forest formations, we assessed the risk status according to the IUCN RLE criteria, and evaluated the conservation status of threatened forests by comparing ecosystem distribution with terrestrial national and provincial nature reserves (NNRs and PNRs, respectively). We found that 90 threatened forest formations accounted for 16% of the area, but for 39.3% of the number of assessed formations. Threatened forest formations were mainly located in western Sichuan, Yunnan, southeastern Xizang, southwestern Guangxi, Hainan Island, northeastern China, and the mountains of Taiwan. Tropical rain forests and evergreen broadleaved forests together accounted for the highest number of threatened formations. Northern Xinjiang (with the Tianshan and Altai Mountains) proved to be a unique area that has rarely been identified as hotspot of plant conservation. On average, NNRs covered 13.2%, and NNRs and PNRs together covered 22.7%, of the threatened forest distribution areas. However, 15 threatened forest formations were not covered by NNRs or PNRs. We suggest that the red list of ecosystems will contribute towards providing a more informative picture of the status of biodiversity. Our work highlights the need to use the red list of ecosystems as additional tool in plant conservation.