Assessing habitat representativeness across individual protected areas uncovers uneven contributions and species-site relationship

Ensuring habitat representativeness is fundamental to area-based conservation, yet the effectiveness and efficiency of individual protected areas in meeting this goal remain underexamined, potentially impeding targeted strategies. Here we assessed habitat representativeness, representativeness contribution and representativeness density across China’s protected areas to evaluate their performance in meeting species conservation needs. The overall network’s habitat representativeness was 62.39%, fully meeting conservation needs for 28.33% of species. Among them, 175 protected areas contributed over half of existing achievement for 751 species, including 148 fully dependent on one site, revealing uneven conservation efforts and species-site dependencies. While protected area size correlated with habitat representativeness and contribution, species richness also correlated with contribution and density, showing size alone may not determine efficiency. We then classified protected areas into four efficiency-based categories and proposed tailored strategies. Our metric-driven assessment provides a systematic approach to identifying gaps and optimizing conservation priorities at site level across country.