Oral presentation

Identifying national biodiversity hotspots using abiotic and climatic factors with modelling approach (example of China)

Sergey Venevsky

Center for Earth System Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

We suggest quantitative measures which allow transfer of two criteria of the 25 global biodiversity hotspots to a national level for 74 large countries and show, how these measures can be applied for mapping of national biodiversity hotspots. To qualify as a global hotspot, an area must contain at least 0.5% of the world’s 300 000 plant species as endemics, and should have lost 70% or more of its primary vegetation (Myers et al., 2000). The plant endemism criteria of global hotspots are captured by quantitative measures of endemism, which are approximately scale-independent and can be corrected for a country’s environmental conditions and priorities in conservation. The definition of global biodiversity hotspot is based on a type of the Threshold Endemism (TE) measure: TE is equal to percentage of plant endemic species to the 300,000 world plant species, where endemics can be meet only in this hotspot and nowhere else (Myers et al., 2000). Such a definition of TE does not take into account the area of a hotspot and, thus, can be applied at national scale. The plant endemism criteria for a national biodiversity hotspot can be defined using the TE lower limit approach as for the global hotspots: a region in a country is defined as the national biodiversity hotspot if TE of the region is larger than a certain predefined percentage of the total number of country’s plant species. As the first approximation we adopted the global average values for the ratio of plant endemics, 0.43. This approximation allows to substitute estimation for number of endemic plant species in a national hotspot by total number of vascular plant species, which can be calculated from abiotic factors, using species-energy theory. The flexible land use criteria for national biodiversity hotspots are defined from percentage of natural vegetation remaining in the global hotspots. The percentage of land use conversion of natural vegetation in the hotspots is at least two times the global value. We can use a similar criteria for identification of national hotspots in a country: an area should have lost at least two times more primary vegetation in comparison with the country’s average loss as a whole. Thus, we show that national biodiversity hotspots can be mapped from the species-energy relationship for vascular plants using climate, topographical and land use data, when spatial pattern of species richness is unknown. The elaborated methodology for mapping national biodiversity hotspots from abiotic factors was applied for case study in Asia-Pacific region (on example of China). The minimum-area-required approach (to locate at minimum area the threshold number of endemic plant species, calculated using SNVP) was applied to border national biodiversity hotspots from the simulated vascular plants species richness data at 0.5°x0.5° spatial resolution. The resulting hotspots are in good spatial correlation agreement with the Chinese hotspots determined independently by experts.






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