Data for: Transboundary conservation hotspots in China and potential impacts of the Belt and Road Initiative

Aim: Biodiversity hotspots often span international borders, thus conservation efforts must as well. China is one of the most biodiverse countries and the length of its international land borders is the longest in the world; thus, there is a strong need for transboundary conservation. We identify China’s transboundary conservation hotspots and analyze the potential effects of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on them to provide recommendations for conservation actions. Location: China, Asia Methods: We compiled a species list of terrestrial vertebrates that span China’s borders. Using their distribution, we extracted the top 30% of the area with the highest richness value weighted by Red List category and considered these transboundary hotspots for conservation priority. Then we analyzed protected area (PA) coverage and connectivity to identify conservation gaps. To measure the potential impact of the BRI, we counted the species whose distribution range is traversed by the BRI and cal..., Data summary: This is the dataset used in the Diversity and Distributions contribution article \"Transboundary conservation hotspots in China and potential impacts of the Belt and Road Initiative\". The dataset includes heat maps of the transboundary distribution of terrestrial vertebrates in China drawn by the authors, as well as selected hotspots in the top 30% by value. In addition, a rasterized 0-1 protected area layer for the study area is provided for research reproduction. The heatmap and hotspots of transboundary species distribution were created as follows: We compiled a list of transboundary terrestrial vertebrates in China from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List database (https://www.iucnredlist.org/). We downloaded data of all species of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles from the database and filtered those living in terrestrial ecosystems. We then filtered these species based on their geographic ranges, to retain species living both in Ch..., R 4.2.0, package include \"sf\",\"terra\". Or alternative Qgis 3.22, ArcGIS 10.6.