Conservation effectiveness of Chinese protected areas on the completeness of medium- and large-bodied mammal community

Abstract

Protected areas (PAs) are essential to the success of global biodiversity conservation, and effectiveness evaluations with quantitative indexes are critically needed to enhance PA performance. Although species richness has been widely used as an index, it is naturally different among ecoregions, making large scale comparison across ecoregions inappropriate. Here, we suggest using the completeness index (CI) and defaunation index (DI) of animal communities as alternative indexes. We compiled a camera-trapping dataset consisting of over 2,023,000 camera days and 619,000 independent detections of 98 medium- and large-bodied mammals (MLMs) in 115 Chinese nature reserves. We then assessed CI and DI of MLMs for each reserve, and identified the environmental and social economic variables that may affect these indexes. We found that CIs and DIs varied greatly among these reserves, and we provided a list of reserves with high conservation priority (with high CIs) and those require restoration efforts (with high DIs). Furthermore, we found that medium-bodied mammals had a higher DI than large-bodied, herbivores had a higher DI than omnivores, and protected species had a higher DI than unprotected species. We also found that MLM communities were better retained in PAs with higher elevation and lower temperature. PA size, the reduction of human disturbances by PA, and scientific research also contributed to MLM community conservation. Our study provides suggestions to improve PA management in China, and demonstrates a new framework to evaluate conservation effectiveness of PAs across ecoregions.