| Summary: | The establishment of protected areas (PAs) is an effective and prevailing tool for conserving wetlands globally, however, strong evidence indicates that not all PAs can deliver adequate conservation to wetland ecosystems due to the impacts of natural and anthropogenic factors. Many studies have used multiple indices to assess the conservation effectiveness of PAs, but those complicated indices are usually difficult to be employed at large-scale. Therefore, this study aims to develop a rapid assessment methodology for conservation effectiveness of wetland PAs across the Chinese mainland. We combined the area and pattern-based landscape indices (i.e., Landuse Dynamic Index and Fragmentation Dynamic Index) to measure wetland landscape changes between 1990 and 2008, based on which we constructed the Area-Pattern Quadrant Analysis (APQA) system to facilitate the conservation assessment of wetland national nature reserves. Four typical modes of landscape changes were generalized to reveal and compare the conservation effectiveness associated with their cause-effect drivers among 92 wetland national nature reserves within ten major river basins across the Chinese mainland. In addition, 210 subcatchments containing the reserves were also used as baselines to assess and discriminate the natural and human-induced effects on the performance of those reserves. The areal percentages among the four modes indicated that the wetland landscape changes were dominated by spatially heterogeneous drivers, and reserves showed relatively low conservation effectiveness, particularly in those densely populated and socioeconomically developed regions such as the Yangtze River Basin, the Yellow River Basin and the Pearl River Basin. Only 16 reserves were excellently rated in conservation effectiveness, in comparison with 31 reserves poorly rated due to greater anthropogenic encroachment. Our research demonstrated that APQA-based landscape assessment can be used as an easily-used early warning indicator to capture wetland landscape changes in relation to their underlying natural and anthropogenic drivers, and to provide knowledge-based management guidance by using standardized and rapid assessment techniques.
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