Chinese scientists reveal hidden extinction crisis in native flora

A new study has revealed a "hidden extinction crisis" in China's flora, showing that habitat decline over the past four decades has sharply increased extinction risks nationwide. The findings, published in One Earth on September 3, suggest that current conservation efforts are failing to keep pace with biodiversity threats.

Led by Dr. SHEN Guozhen from the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with international collaborators, the researchers combined satellite-based land-cover data (1980–2018) with species-composition models to quantify—for the first time at a national scale—how habitat loss is reshaping extinction risk across entire plant communities.

They found that extinction risk among China's vascular plants has increased by 3.9% nationwide, coinciding with a 2.8% decrease in native habitats. Risks are highest in eastern China, home to more than 90% of the country's plant species, where reserves are small, fragmented, and have lost nearly one-fifth of their core zones. Meanwhile, over 70% of protected areas are concentrated in the west, where risks are comparatively low.

Despite apparent greening, unique native communities continue to vanish as ecological functions degrade, creating a "greening illusion" that masks biodiversity loss. This hides biodiversity decline, while global conservation tools such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List remain limited by static, species-focused assessments that overlook emerging risks from recent habitat degradation.

By introducing a dynamic, spatially explicit framework for quantifying extinction risk, the study offers an early-warning paradigm for biodiversity loss, an irreversible environmental change now unfolding worldwide. It underscores that existing conservation measures have not been timely or effective enough to halt the decline and calls for urgent action to integrate wilderness protection and habitat-based assessments into conservation planning.

This work offers a "China solution" for curbing the ongoing global biodiversity decline and achieving the goals of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

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