The extinction risk of endemic birds of mainland China was modeled over evolutionary time. Results showed that extinction risk of endemic birds in mainland China always tended to be similar within subclades over the evolutionary time of species divergence, and the overall evolution of extinction risk of species presented a conservatism pattern, as evidenced by the disparity-through-time plot. A constant-rate evolutionary model was the best one to quantify the evolution of extinction risk of endemic birds of mainland China. Thus, there was no rate shifting pattern for the evolution of extinction risk of Chinese endemic birds over time. In a summary, extinction risk of endemic birds of mainland China is systematically quantified under the evolutionary framework in the present work. 1. Introduction Global biodiversity crisis is emerging and increasingly recognized in recent years for biologists [1]. Terrestrial environment has been widely affected by humans [2] and habitats of terrestrial species are facing irreplaceable transformation which in term would pose great threats to the survival of these species. It is said that worldwide organisms are now facing the sixth mass extinction period [3, 4]. In such a context, ecologists have high pressures to facilitate conservation measures so as to better offer refuges for conserving species. One of these measures is to understand the evolution and drivers of extinction risk of species [5, 6]. Birds are an important vertebrate taxonomy and deserve to be allocated more conservation efforts because of their popularity for common people [7–9]. Understanding and modeling extinction risk of birds would be an important step to set up corresponding conservation strategies. There are growing interests focusing on the diversification, biogeography, conservation, and extinction risk of bird species [10–13]. In recent years, one of the trends in conservation biology is to sufficiently incorporate evolutionary information for the purpose to evaluate the impacts of species history on structuring species’ contemporary distribution [14], conservation priorities [15, 16], or threatened risk [2, 17, 18]. One rationale for modeling extinction risk of species through phylogenetic tree is that the underlying ecological variables associated with extinction risk of species are related to evolutionary history of species, for example, distributional ranges [14, 19], morphological traits [20], physiological tolerance spectrum of environmental conditions [21], and others. China is one of the megabiodiverse countries over the world [22].
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