Comprehensive scientific investigation had been conducted three times every ten-year since 1988 in Gansu Anxi Extreme Arid National Nature Reserve. According to the survey data, the species diversities of vertebrates in this region have some alterations over the past two decades. Two introduced species of Cypriniformes have been found newly in the Reserve but other three native loaches and carp species lost their distribution. The situation of amphibians and reptiles keep stable. Among the 151 avian species recorded during the three investigations, there were 84 species (55.63%) remain stable in the region. The avifauna belonging to the Oriental Region has increased evidently and some species spread their distribution west toward the Reserve on account of climate warming. The changes of bird species composition over 20 years also include new colonization taken by species from the west and the Tibet plateau, and distributing extinction of 29 species which mainly include summer migratory species (41.37%) and transient migrants (48.28%). The composition of mammals is relative stable and the emergence of small five-toed jerboa (Allactaga elater), which is also a new rodent record of Gansu province, indicates the tendency of its distribution spreading to the southeast.

Abundance is an important parameter used to estimate the population size of various wildlife species. With the growing application of camera-traps (movement or heat activated) to monitoring wildlife, the relative abundance index (RAI) has become one of the most popular indicators of population abundance for inventories and assessment. Despite a simple and convenient indicator of population size, RAI obtained from camera-trapping data can be greatly affected by many factors such as species traits, detection rates and environmental factors. Therefore, we need verify the correlation between RAI and population density prior to its general application. So far, several types of RAIs have been developed based on camera-trapping data, and it is critical to compare these RAI indices and their applications. In this paper, we summarized the methods calculating RAI with camera-trapping data and reviewed their applications in wildlife monitoring and inventories in China. Four main types of RAIs were identified including (1) the number of days when one animal is photographed, (2) the number of photographs of focal species per 100 trap days, (3) the number of photographs of focal species per trap day, and (4) the proportion of photos from the focal species compared to all photos of all animals. Among them, the second RAI type is the most widely used (72.5%) in wildlife monitoring and inventories in China, and the fourth RAI type is used to compare species components in communities. Consequently, we recommend the second RAI type for estimating population abundance in particular when camera-trapping data are used for broad-scale comparisons over different spatial and temporal scales.

The biological inventory within the established protected areas is the fundamental of biodiversity research and monitoring at both regional and national levels, and camera-trapping has been considered one of the most efficient tools for inventory of mammal community. Laohegou Nature Reserve is located in northern Minshan Mountains, Sichuan Province, and within the core area across the distribution of the iconic conservation species, giant panda Ailuropoda melanoleuca. Prior to its establishment in 2012, little is known about the mammal fauna in this area. From 2011 to 2014, we conducted a camera-trapping survey to census the mammals of Laohegou by dividing the reserve into 1 km x 1 km survey blocks. With an extensive survey effort of 9,188 camera-days, we detected and identified 24 wild mammal species and 1 domestic mammal species belonging to 7 orders and 18 families. Other unidentified animals were primarily small-bodied mammals of Chiroptera, Insectivora and Rodentia. Carnivora (9 species) was the most diversity taxon, followed by Artiodactyla (7 species) and Rodentia (6 species). Artiodactyla was the order with the highest detections (43.97%), followed by Rodentia (25.61%) and Carnivora (22.44%), all three taxa summed up to 92.02% of all detections. Three mammal species are evaluated as Endangered by IUCN Red List, 3 species as Vulnerable and 3 species as Near Threatened. Four species are listed as Class I state key protected wild animals in China and 5 species as Class II. This study was the first systematic inventory on the large mammals of Laohegou Nature Reserve. The results provide us valuable information of the community structure, spatial distribution and relative abundance, which will serve as a baseline and foundation for future research and conservation management.

During the last two decades, infrared-triggered camera-trapping has been widely used in wildlife and biodiversity research and conservation. In the areas of wildlife ecology research, animal species inventory, biodiversity monitoring and protected area management in China, considerable outputs have been produced by scientific research and conservation applications based on camera-trapping. This technique has been successfully used to detect rare or elusive species, conduct biodiversity inventory, study animal behavior, estimate population parameters, and evaluate the effectiveness of protected area management. Along with the rapid development of modern ecological analysis and modeling tools, camera-trapping will play a more important role in wildlife research at various levels. Meanwhile, along with improvements in techniques, decreasing cost and increasing application interests, camera-trapping will be adopted by more researchers, wildlife managers and protected areas, and can be used for systematic wildlife monitoring using standard protocols. Efforts devoted to its future development and applications should focus on establishing systematically-designed monitoring networks and data-sharing protocols, and developing new analytical approaches and statistical models specifically based on camera-trapping data.

2) in the reserve, we recorded 15 medium and large mammal species and three pheasant species. Based on species accumulation curves as a function of grids and camera days when 90% of expected species richness was recorded in the reserve, the minimum grids with fixed camera days and the minimum camera days with fixed grids were less during the wet season (June-August) than during the dry season (October-December). Moreover, the minimum grids with fixed camera days and the minimum camera days with fixed grids during the dry season were less than during the wet season. Based the camera trapping data, the species inventory assessment in the reserve can cover species lists and species richness of terrestrial birds and mammals, as well as relative abundance, distribution and voucher images of each species. Therefore, the Chebaling case based on the whole-area species inventory and assessment can provide technical references for China’s natural protected areas.]]>