Establish IUCN Red List of ecosystems in Southwestern China based on remote sensing data

The world's ecosystems and biodiversity have suffered a great loss as the result of human activities, which considerably attract urgent for the assessment of the biodiversity at ecosystem-level. Thus, the IUCN Council recently adopted a new Red List criteria as a global standard for ecosystem risk assessment, aims to establish a global Red List of ecosystem. Remote sensing is one of the most powerful technology for earth observation at macro-scale, which have great potential to impetus the establishment of a global Red List of ecosystem. Here we operated a systematic assessment of ecosystems with this protocol in Southwestern China, to present the procedure of assessment for biodiversity at ecosystem level based on remote sensing data and test the applicability of IUCN Red List criteria in high heterogeneous region. The result show that the red lists of this area contain all the nationally protected types of Atlas of China's vegetation, which means the high robustness of the protocol. The prospects indicate that remote sensing may play a more important role in achieving the goal of global Red List of ecosystems.