Current national nature reserves are insufficient to safeguard the long-term survival of birds and mammals in China

Data associated with the publication: Current national nature reserves are insufficient to safeguard the long-term survival of birds and mammals in China.

Enhancing the connectivity of protected areas is a global consensus for conserving biodiversity. Yet, it is unclear whether habitats are sufficiently connected within protected areas to efficiently protect wildlife populations for long-term survival. Using the perspective of functional connectivity, we evaluated the capacity and limiting factors of the 474 national nature reserves of China in protecting the long-term survival of bird and mammal populations in their internal habitats. We show that, in general, China's national nature reserves can effectively protect about one-half of the bird and mammal populations within protected areas for long-term survival. However, they can only protect 25% birds and 13% of terrestrial mammals with high motility. Areas of low conservation effectiveness are highly overlapped with PAs of small size and high intensity of human activity. Artificial landscapes such as roads and settlements, which account for less than 2% area of the PAs, disproportionately cause nearly 40% of the connectivity loss. The results suggest that maintaining high levels of functional connectivity within protected areas is as important as maintaining high connectivity in the national or global protected area networks. Our findings have important implications for improving the management of protected areas in China and beyond. The main data analyzed are the connectivity model outputs, for the data used to plot the main graphs used in this dataset.