Drought vulnerability among China's ungulates and mitigation offered by protected areas

Abstract

Ongoing perturbations in the global climate have triggered changes in the frequency or magnitude of extreme climatic events, including drought. Increasingly common or intense droughts have threatened ungulates. Intensifying trend of drought has been observed in China since the 1980s. We assessed drought vulnerability of 60 ungulate taxa distributed in China by synthesizing information on drought exposure and intrinsic vulnerability related to biological traits. In total, 27 taxa were identified as vulnerable to drought, which represent over half of the taxa assessed as threatened in the IUCN Red List and China's National Red List. We identified hotspots where a high number of drought‐vulnerable taxa are concentrated, including Northeast Himalayan subalpine conifer forests, alpine conifer and mixed forests of Nujiang‐Lancang Gorge, and Qionglai‐Minshan conifer forests, which are all located in Southwest China. We also assessed conservation efforts that China has allocated to ungulate taxa vulnerable to drought. Drought‐vulnerable taxa that are endemic to China have significantly lower coverage in China's National Nature Reserve system compared with nonvulnerable taxa. These findings reveal the gaps in existing conservation efforts and indicate possible improvements that might be needed to maintain species resistance in the face of increasing and intensifying drought impacts.

Geography, taxonomy, extinction risk and exposure of fully migratory birds to droughts and cyclones

“…Furthermore, we have identified 182 species that are highly cumulatively exposed to one of these phenomena within at least one seasonal range, and we have described geographic hotspots where species are found to be most exposed to cyclones and droughts. Cyclones and droughts have a widely documented capacity to impact populations through habitat loss, resource shortage and increased interspecies conflict (Zhang et al, 2019(Zhang et al, , 2020; being able to accurately and comprehensively identify species threatened by these extreme events is thus key to secure their future. Exposure analyses utilizing historic and spatial data, such as those carried out here, could offer a systematic approach to objectively identify assessments where such threats should be listed.…”

“…We used GPCC‐DI data with a 12‐month accumulation period for our analysis: where 12 consecutive months are compared with the same 12 consecutive months in all previous years of available data. This temporal grain reflects long‐term patterns where dryness (indicated by values <0, Table S1.2) can be associated with a negative impact on the availability of water, food resources, vegetation greenness, and other factors in the migratory birds' habitat that can affect populations (Cady et al., 2019; WMO, 2012; Zhang et al., 2020). We reprojected the GPCC‐DI data onto the same 9.65 km resolution Behrmann raster grid used for the species ranges.…”

“…Following recommendations from the IUCN-SSC's guidelines for assessing species' vulnerability to climate change (Foden & Young, 2016), we used an exposure analysis to assess the vulnerability of fully migratory birds to cyclones and drought. We quantified exposure by calculating the percentage of spatial overlap between a species' range and the extent of a cyclone or drought event within a given time series (Ameca y Juárez et al, 2013;Duncan et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2019Zhang et al, , 2020. We estimated two metrics of exposure for both cyclones and drought and, in both cases, estimated separate exposure metrics for species' breeding and wintering ranges to climatic events during the period from 1985 to 2014.…”

“…Exposure alone has been used as a valuable measure of vulnerability for species where comprehensive data are lacking (Foden et al., 2019). Typically, studies assessing the exposure to extreme events of sedentary, spatially scattered species assume an equal effect across the entirety of a species' geographic distribution (Ameca y Juárez et al., 2013; Duncan et al., 2012; Zhang et al., 2020). However, for fully migratory species with distinct seasonal ranges, another approach is required, and here we assess the seasonal (breeding and wintering) ranges of each species separately.…”