Distribution and protection of ecological specialists in Chinese terrestrial mammals

Aim: Specialist species are characterized as species with a narrow niche and, thus, vulnerable to environmental changes and disturbance. Understanding the distribution of specialists is important for developing proactive conservation strategies. Although China is among the countries with the highest diversity of mammals, no previous studies have explored the distribution and conservation status of specialists in Chinese mammals.
Location: China.
Time period: Present day.
Taxa studied: Chinese terrestrial mammals.
Methods: We assessed the distribution of three types of specialization in Chinese terrestrial mammals: diet specialist, habitat specialist, and extreme specialist (i.e., species that are both diet and habitat specialist). We adopted generalized linear models to test whether some landscape-level factors explain the variation of each type of specialization richness. Gap analyses were conducted to assess the conservation status of the specialists identified.
Results: From a total ..., 1 Distribution of terrestrial mammals and protected areas
    Using ArcGIS v. 10.2 (ESRI, 2013), we generated a 50 × 50 km2 grid over China and then overlaid the polygon shape files (downloaded from www.iucnredlist.org) representing the distribution of terrestrial mammals. This procedure resulted in 621 terrestrial mammals entirely or partly distributed in China. We obtained the spatial data of worldwide protected areas from the World Database on Protected Areas (www.protectedplanet.net). We then overlaid the polygons of protected areas with the 50 × 50 km2 grid over China and calculated the area of protected areas included in each 2500 km2 cell.
2 Mapping diet and habitat specialization in Chinese terrestrial mammals
    For each of these species, we obtained diet information from the EltonTraits database (Wilman et al., 2014). This database used semi-quantitative information (scores from literature based on word order in sentences describing the diet) to achieve the diet composition o..., , # Distribution and protection of ecological specialists in Chinese terrestrial mammals

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jh9w0vtm8](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jh9w0vtm8)

## Description of the data and file structure

### Files and variables

#### File: GridData.xlsx

**Description:** This table indicates the species richness of each type of specialist and the values of landscape factors per cell.

##### Variables

* TargetFID: ID of each cell.
* Richness: number of terrestrial mammal species within each cell.
* DietSpecialistRichness: number of diet specialist species within each cell.
* HabitatSpecialistRichness: number of habitat specialist species within each cell.
* ExtremeSpecialistRichness: number of extreme specialist species within each cell.
* DominantHabitat: dominant habitat type within each cell.
* HabitatDiversity: denoted by Shannon-Wiener Index.
* Elevation: mean elevation within each cell.
* ELevationRange: range of elevation within each cell.
* ProtectedArea: size of ...