Species richness and adaptive capacity in animal communities: lessons from China

Climate change is already threatening the long-term viability of many important protected areas, and as global warming accelerates this will increase. Lowered water tables, melting permafrost, changing vegetation zones, combined with the fragmentary distribution of wilderness areas, will cause a wave of local extinctions as species fail to adapt to changing conditions in time or fail to move as climate zones advance across the face of the continents. Ecologists can predict and even model likely scenarios, but can we do anything to help safeguard valuable biodiversity or must we passively document Earth's changes and accept these losses? Studies of the extraordinary species richness of the Hengduan Mountains and the Qionglai Mountain ranges of South-West China and of the Changbaishan Mountains in North-East China give us some optimism. This paper provides an explanation for the high species richness in these ranges and identifies design principles that can be used in the selection of protected areas or in the revision of existing protected area boundaries to enhance their ecological resilience and allow them to maintain higher levels of biological diversity under conditions of climate change or other disturbance.