Legal protection biases and gaps for China’s threatened vascular plants

With over 10% of its flora threatened, China faces a growing plant extinction crisis. While the List of National Key Protected Wild Plants (Legal Protection List) currently provides legal protection to over 1,100 plant species, its overall coverage and effectiveness remain uncertain. Here, we integrated the vascular plants in China’s Threatened Species List and the Legal Protection List to assess the legal protection of 4,393 key species. Using > 110,000 distribution records and a comprehensive phylogeny, we evaluated the taxonomic and phylogenetic distribution of legally protected versus unprotected species and projected their responses to future climate change. We also assessed spatial variation in the effectiveness of legal protection using a newly developed Legal Protection Index (LPI). Our results indicate that legal protection extends to only 18% of threatened species. Unprotected species are phylogenetically clustered and disproportionately vulnerable to future climate, highlighting 208 species as high-priority candidates for legal protection. Regions with the highest taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity—Southwestern China, Hainan, and Taiwan—exhibit the lowest effectiveness of legal protection, representing critical protection gaps. However, a positive finding is that 72% of species and 83% of evolutionary history in these regions are already safeguarded through in situ conservation, although nationwide, 1,195 threatened species remain neither legally protected nor conserved in nature reserves. These findings highlight spatial and evolutionary gaps in China’s legal protection system and offer a roadmap for prioritizing climate-resilient and evolutionarily informed conservation strategies.

• Publication year

  2026

• Venue

  The Innovation Life

• Publication date

  Unknown publication date

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.59717/j.xinn-life.2026.100205
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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