Search

Establishing protected areas (PAs) is a major measure of biodiversity conservation, and various methods have been explored to assess PAs’ effectiveness. However, those methods mainly compared the relative changes in land cover between treated samples inside the PAs and their matched samples outside the PAs, which would produce misjudgments, especially in some climax communities with a relatively steady state. Thus, in this study, we constructed an integrated framework through a series of assessments according to the state, trend, and relative change of each PA to explore the conservation effectiveness of PAs in the Three Parallel Rivers Region in China from 2000 to 2020. Here, “state” refers to the difference among samples from within and outside the PA, assessed through yearly sample mean comparison. “Trend” means linear regression of mean forest area of each PA throughout the assessment period. “Relative change” means the difference in the mean value of the slope of forest changes between the treated samples inside each PA and their matched control samples outside of PAs. The entire forest area within all PAs in the Three Parallel Rivers Region showed a significant increasing trend from 2000 to 2020 (R2 = 0.919, P

Exploring the contribution of protected areas to carbon sequestration services is meaningful to enhance the role of protected areas in climate change mitigation globally. However, less attention has been paid to the contribution of different types of protected areas to carbon sequestration services as well as their changes, which is not conducive to provide more effective solutions in the context of future climate change. Here, we identified the status and changes of carbon sequestration in different types of terrestrial protected areas in China and calculated the amount of carbon sequestration in different ecosystems in terrestrial protected areas and in different climatic zones. Our results indicated that carbon sequestration of China’s terrestrial protected areas had shown a significant increasing trend over the past 40 years (1980–2020) (R2 = 0.862, p