Abstract
Protected areas (PAs) are cornerstones of biodiversity conservation, harbouring key mammal species such as apex predators that are important in maintaining trophic cascades and contribute to ecosystem resilience. However, whether PAs have preserved historical wildlife assemblages remains poorly quantified, mainly due to a lack of comparable data from historical and current periods. Here we used comprehensive data from historical investigations during the 1950s and 1970s, as well as current surveys based on 8,300 camera traps between 2008 and 2021 across 85 PAs in China, to assess range contractions of 82 large- and medium-bodied mammals. We found that carnivores disappeared from 59.4% of their historical sites, a rate much higher than that observed in ungulates (37.2%). Moreover, while 52.9% of PAs retained more than 70% of their ungulate species, over 70% of PAs lost over half of their carnivore species, with PAs in southern China being range contraction hotspots, particularly for carnivore species with larger body sizes and shorter generation lengths. Our findings reveal widespread range contraction of carnivores in China’s PAs compared with historical periods, driven primarily by legacy effects of large-scale anthropogenic disturbances and human–wildlife conflict, necessitating initiatives to maintain and restore historical assemblages of carnivores alongside habitat protection.
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Data availability
The species records from historical and current surveys that support the findings of this study are available in Supplementary Data 1.
Code availability
All the computational analyses were performed in R v.4.3.0 (ref. 69). The code to run the analyses is available via Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28694552 (ref. 70).
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant no. 2022YFF0802400 to J.L.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 32271733 to J.H.), the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (grant no. 2023A1515011045 to J.H.) and Science and Technology Projects in Guangzhou (grant no. 2023A04J0121 to J.H.).
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J.H. and J.L. conceived the ideas and designed the study. J.H, L.Z. and J.Y. collected the data. J.H. and J.L. performed the analyses. J.H. and J.L. led the writing of the paper. J.H., F.W., Z.X. and J.L. contributed to the revisions of the paper. All authors reviewed the contents and approved the final paper.
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He, J., Zhang, L., Yu, J. et al. Widespread range contraction of carnivores in protected areas of China.
Nat Sustain (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-026-01855-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-026-01855-2
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