With intensifying human activity, many species are threatened with extinction. However, many other species have expanded their range.
Is there a general rule to identify which species are "losers" or "winners"? And what is the effect of range changes on the biodiversity of Chinese flora?
A research team led by Prof. MA Keping from the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with scientists from the Center for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World (BIOCHANGE) at Aarhus University (Denmark), revealed that narrow-ranged plants in China are more likely to be "losers", whereas widespread species tend to be "winners" under the condition of intensive human activity. This study was published in the journal PNAS on Dec. 17.
China is one of world’s most species-rich countries, but it has suffered from long-term, intense human pressure exacerbated by uneven human population distribution across the country. For example, most people in China live southeast of an imaginary diagonal line, known as the "Hu Huanyong Line" for the demographer who created it, which stretches from Heihe City in Heilongjiang Province to Tengchong City in Yunnan Province.
Due to the lack of extensive, dynamic species distribution data, relatively few studies have comprehensively evaluated the impact of humans on large-scale distribution of species in high-diversity organism groups. Furthermore, such assessments are complicated by the confounding effects of natural drivers such as climate.
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