Identification of Wetland Conservation Gaps in Rapidly Urbanizing Areas: A Case Study in Zhengzhou, China

Exploring protected area (PA) siting from a biodiversity perspective is critical in mitigating human impacts on ecosystems. This paper used the MaxEnt model to predict the geographic distribution patterns of wetland species in Zhengzhou and the environmental factors affecting species’ habitat selection. Environmental variables were screened by correlation analysis to avoid affecting the prediction results due to overfitting of the model. The AUC value of the training set of the model ROC curve was above 0.8, and the prediction accuracy was high. The prediction results showed that the only nature reserve in Zhengzhou, Yellow River Wetland Nature Reserve, currently covers only 10.25% of the total area of the high suitability areas for plants and 17.54% of the high suitability habitat areas for waterfowl in the whole area of Zhengzhou. The potential suitability areas of wetland species outside the reserve can provide a basis for site selection for wetland conservation planning in Zhengzhou. It was found that the geographic distribution of wetland species in Zhengzhou is constrained by the distribution of water bodies, bioclimatic variables, land cover, and population density