Threat assessment of future climate change to China’s seed plants

Future climate change is a major threat to the maintenance of global biodiversity and the stability of ecosystems. There is now a global consensus to mitigate the risk of species extinction and maintain ecosystem stability by prioritizing the conservation of threatened species and refining the Red List of threatened species foundational for biodiversity conservation. Using distribution data of 28450 seed plant species from 10 km×10 km areas in China (ca. 82.3% of all China’s seed species), we predicted the future distribution of these species using species distribution models and estimated the changes in their future distribution. Using the IUCN Red List A3c criteria, we assessed the threats that different future climate change scenarios may pose to seed plants. Subsequently, we integrated our evaluation results with the current Red List of threatened species to update the threat levels of China’s seed plants, leading to a new Red List of threatened seed plant species in China. The new Red List contains 34550 seed plant species (approximately the total number of China’s seed plants based on available data). Our results indicate that under the three future climate change scenarios (SSP126, SSP245, and SSP585) and three species dispersal scenarios (full dispersal, dispersal of 20 km every decade, and no dispersal), 4444–11467 seed plant species are threatened, accounting for 12.9%–33.2% of the total number of China’s seed plants. Among these threatened species, 1878–4330 are woody species (14.8–34.1% of all woody plants) and 2566–7137 are herbaceous species (11.7–32.7% of all herbaceous species). Additionally, 2962–3915 species (8.5%–11.3% of all China’s seed plant species) are categorized as data deficient. This study quantitatively assessed the potential threat of future climate change to seed plant species in China and updated the IUCN Red List of Chinese seed plants. Therefore, this study provides important baseline data for China’s plant biodiversity conservation practice.