Abstract:

The world is currently experiencing a biodiversity crisis, and climate and land-cover changes are now recognized as two major threats to biodiversity. China is one of the mega-biodiversity countries and the threatened species list of China’s higher plants was reported in 2017. This list provided important data for biological conservation and protected area planning from regional to global scales. However, it was mainly based on the past and current status of species population and distribution, while future responses of species to climate and land-cover changes were rarely considered. This will lead to an underestimation of future local extinction risks. Using high-resolution species distribution data of woody plants and species distribution models, we evaluated the impacts of climate and land-cover changes on woody species distributions and estimated changes in the extent of occurrence (EOA) for each species. Our results indicate that 12.9%-40.5% of woody species will be threatened under different climate and dispersal scenarios. Based on these results, we updated the list of threatened woody species in China based on the IUCN Red List Criteria. This new list of threatened woody species provides important data for assessing the conservation priorities of woody plants, for the planning of future nature reserve extension, for improving the performance of nature reserves under future global change scenarios, and for updating the list of threatened species of other taxa.

Key words: IUCN Red List, woody plant species, threatened categories, global changes, China