China’s large coastal animals are poorly served by biodiversity protections, a nation-wide assessment has revealed. The study, published in Science Advances, suggests that there’s a need for improved conservation measures along China’s coasts.
Study co-author Qiang He, a coastal ecologist at Fudan University in Shanghai, says that larger coastal animals are often overlooked. “You can see a lot of news about the giant panda and terrestrial biodiversity conservation, but you don’t see a lot of news about megafauna in coastal areas in China,” he says.
To gauge how coastal animals are faring, He and his colleagues collated data on fish, mammals, birds, reptiles and cephalopods — including octopuses, squid and cuttlefish — with an adult body mass of at least 10 kilograms that live in China’s coastal habitats. They identified more than 200 species across ecosystems including salt marshes, mangrove forests, seagrass beds, coral reefs and deeper waters.
They then looked at whether those species were identified as being threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List — a global inventory of species’ conservation status — and what level of protection exists in China.
Almost half of the species identified (44%) are classed as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Yet 78% of the species have not been assessed for local extinction risk, and so don’t appear on China’s own Red List, or are listed as data deficient. “Even if they’re critically endangered or endangered on a global level, they are still not assessed in China,” he says. And almost three-quarters are not protected by any of China’s wildlife-protection laws.
The researchers also assessed species’ importance using a measure called the FUSE index — standing for functionally unique, specialized and endangered — which scores endangered species on the basis of the importance of their roles in their ecosystems. Of the top 50 large coastal animals ranked by their FUSE score, only 17 are currently protected in China.
Nicholas Murray, a conservation ecologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, says the lack of protection for larger species “suggests that most coastal species in China — the small ones as well — are being similarly impacted”.
The study lays important groundwork that will help conservation in these coastal zones, says Murray. “They did a lot of work to build a new database,” he says, and the more such data sets become available for analysis, the better countries such as China will be able to manage their coastal ecosystems.