Hainan Key Laboratory for Sustainable Utilization of Tropical Bioresources, College of Tropical Crops, Hainan University, Haikou, China.
Key Laboratory of Plant Resource Conservation and Sustainable Utilization, South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Science, Guangzhou, China.
PLoS One. 2021 Sep 29;16(9):e0257575. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257575. eCollection 2021.
The roles of natural and anthropogenic factors in contributing to the organization of biodiversity at large and small scales have long been challenging to disentangle, and doing so has never been attempted for the island province of Hainan in China based on patterns of taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity. Therefore, in this study, we evaluated the taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity of endemic plants on the island as a function of anthropogenic and natural variables based on non-metric multi-dimensional scaling (NMDS) ordination and generated generalized linear models (GLMs). We found that the highest phylogenetic diversity (1006) and the lowest mean phylogenetic distance (515.5) was in the provincial capital, Haikou. The NMDS analyses indicated that taxonomic diversity was significantly correlated with industrial revenue (p = 0.006) and population (p = 0.004). Furthermore, most phylogenetic diversity indices were strongly correlated with population and agricultural revenue, while the sampled natural environmental variables were not significantly correlated with plant diversity indices. These findings indicate that anthropogenic factors are the main present-day driving forces of plant diversity in Hainan, though we did detect a significant latitudinal diversity gradient of richness that likely reflects the historical roles of natural environmental factors in the organization of biodiversity on the island. Overall, our results are alarming for biodiversity of the island and indicate that conservation and sustainable use of endemic plant species must be made a critical priority.
长期以来，自然和人为因素在大尺度和小尺度上对生物多样性的组织作用一直难以区分，而且基于分类学和系统发育多样性模式，中国海南岛这个岛屿省份从未尝试过这样做。因此，在这项研究中，我们根据非度量多维尺度分析（NMDS）排序和广义线性模型（GLMs），评估了岛上特有植物的分类学和系统发育多样性作为人为和自然变量的函数。我们发现，省会海口的系统发育多样性最高（1006），平均系统发育距离最低（515.5）。NMDS 分析表明，分类多样性与工业收入（p = 0.006）和人口（p = 0.004）显著相关。此外，大多数系统发育多样性指数与人口和农业收入密切相关，而采样的自然环境变量与植物多样性指数没有显著相关性。这些发现表明，人为因素是海南植物多样性的主要现代驱动力，尽管我们确实检测到了丰富度的显著纬度多样性梯度，这可能反映了自然环境因素在岛屿生物多样性组织中的历史作用。总的来说，我们的研究结果令人震惊，表明必须将保护和可持续利用特有植物物种作为一个关键优先事项。
