Current national nature reserves are insufficient to safeguard the long-term survival of birds and mammals in China

Data associated with the publication: Current national nature reserves are insufficient to safeguard the long-term survival of birds and mammals in China.Enhancing the connectivity of protected areas is a global consensus for conserving biodiversity. Yet, it is unclear whether habitats are sufficiently connected within protected areas to efficiently protect wildlife populations for long-term survival. Using the perspective of functional connectivity, we evaluated the capacity and limiting factors of the 474 national nature reserves of China in protecting the long-term survival of bird and mammal populations in their internal habitats. We show that, in general, China's national nature reserves can effectively protect about one-half of the bird and mammal populations within protected areas for long-term survival. However, they can only protect 25% birds and 13% of terrestrial mammals with high motility. Areas of low conservation effectiveness are highly overlapped with PAs of small size and high intensity of human activity. Artificial landscapes such as roads and settlements, which account for less than 2% area of the PAs, disproportionately cause nearly 40% of the connectivity loss. The results suggest that maintaining high levels of functional connectivity within protected areas is as important as maintaining high connectivity in the national or global protected area networks. Our findings have important implications for improving the management of protected areas in China and beyond. The main data analyzed are the connectivity model outputs, for the data used to plot the main graphs used in this dataset.

本数据集对应发表论文：当前中国国家级自然保护区尚不足以保障鸟类与哺乳类的长期存续。加强保护地（Protected Areas，下文简称PAs）连通性是生物多样性保护的全球共识，但目前仍不清楚保护地内部的栖息地连通性是否足以长期高效保护野生动物种群。本研究以功能连通性（functional connectivity）为视角，评估了中国474处国家级自然保护区在其境内栖息地中保护鸟类与哺乳类种群长期存续的能力及限制因素。研究结果显示，总体而言，中国国家级自然保护区可有效保护保护区内约半数鸟类与哺乳类种群实现长期存续；但仅能保护25%的鸟类以及13%的高移动性陆生哺乳类。保护成效较低的区域与面积较小、人类活动强度较高的PAs高度重叠。仅占PAs总面积不足2%的道路、居民点等人工景观，却造成了近40%的连通性损失，影响远超其面积占比。本研究结果表明，维持保护地内部的高水平功能连通性，与维持国家或全球保护地网络的高连通性同等重要。本研究发现对中国乃至全球的保护地管理优化具有重要参考价值。本数据集的核心分析数据为连通性模型输出结果，即用于绘制论文主图的相关数据。