Date: September 4, 2026
Danzhou, China: Hainan Island, China's largest tropical island, hosts unique mammalian fauna shaped by long‑term geographic isolation. Drawing on the foundational 1983 work Birds and Mammals of Hainan Island, researchers have integrated four decades‑worth of literature, museum specimen records and modern taxonomic frameworks to compile a comprehensive updated checklist of terrestrial mammals.
Published in Biological Diversity, the study documents 95 terrestrial mammal species belonging to 9 orders, 26 families and 63 genera, accounting for 12.91 % of China's terrestrial mammalian species richness. Compared with the 1983 baseline of 76 species, the team revised taxonomic status and nomenclature for 40 species and added 19 distribution records for the island, mostly bats and rodents. Two previously reported species were excluded because their distributions fall outside Hainan Island proper or lack solid field evidence.
The research assessed conservation status across multiple authoritative datasets, including the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, CITES appendices and China's national and provincial wildlife inventories. Ten species qualify as threatened under IUCN criteria, while 22 species are threatened according to the China Red List of Biodiversity. Seven species are endemic to China, six of them occurring exclusively on Hainan Island.
Consistent with island‑biogeography theory, Hainan holds fewer mammal species than neighbouring Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. Nevertheless, the island features a higher proportion of critically endangered taxa, making local wildlife exceptionally vulnerable to human disturbance and habitat fragmentation. Roughly 10 % of recorded species remain data‑deficient or unevaluated, particularly among insectivorous bats and forest‑dwelling rodents.
The authors recommend integrative taxonomic work combining molecular and morphological evidence, targeted field surveys, long‑term biodiversity monitoring, strengthened in‑situ and ex‑situ conservation, and regular dynamic updates of taxonomic and threat assessments. This new checklist delivers an essential baseline to guide evidence‑based conservation planning for Hainan's distinctive mammal assemblages.
Original Source
Z. Yang, G. Lu, Y. Chen, and Y. Chen, "An Updated Checklist of Terrestrial Mammals of Hainan Island, China," Biological Diversity (2026): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1002/bod2.70035 .
Keywords
Hainan Island, species cataloging, taxonomy, terrestrial mammals
About the Author
Yuan Chen (Corresponding author), PhD, Full‑time Faculty Member at Department of Ecology, Hainan University. His main research interests include: 1) Primate behavioural ecology: behavioural adaptations of Hainan gibbons and macaques to their habitats; 2) Mammal diversity and conservation: spatial distribution and interspecific relationships of small‑ and medium‑sized mammals in tropical forests; 3) Plant‑animal interactions: seed‑dispersal functions of frugivorous mammals such as the Hainan gibbon and masked palm civet. He currently leads six research projects, including grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Hainan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China, and sub‑projects of the Hainan Provincial Key Research and Development Programme. He has published more than 20 academic papers, among which over 10 are first‑author or corresponding‑author articles in key ecological and zoological journals such as Biological Conservation, Integrative Zoology, Oecologia, Biodiversity Science, and Acta Theriologica Sinica.
About the Journal
Biological Diversity (ISSN: 2994-4139) is a peer-reviewed, international, open-access journal, sponsored by the South China Botanical Garden (SCBG), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and published in partnership with John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. It is dedicated to advancing biodiversity conservation, safeguarding ecosystem functions and services, and promoting the sustainable utilization of biological resources under global environmental change. The journal welcomes original research, reviews, commentaries, and short communications across a broad spectrum of disciplines, including botany, zoology, microbiology, taxonomy, phylogenetics, genomics, cytology, ecology, climatology, economics, sociology, and real-time policy theory. The journal is indexed in Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) and Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
