Complementarity, completeness and quality of long-term faunal archives in an Asian biodiversity hotspot.

ABSTRACT: Long-term baselines on biodiversity change through time are crucial to inform conservation decision-making in biodiversity hotspots, but environmental archives remain unavailable for many regions. Extensive palaeontological, zooarchaeological and historical records and indigenous knowledge about past environmental conditions exist for China, a megadiverse country experiencing large-scale biodiversity loss, but their potential to understand past human-caused faunal turnover is not fully assessed. We investigate a series of complementary environmental archives to evaluate the quality of the Holocene-historical faunal record of Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, for establishing new baselines on postglacial mammalian diversity and extinction dynamics. Synthesis of multiple archives

SUBMITTER: Turvey ST 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6863502 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature