Global conservation of species’ niches

Environmental change is rapidly accelerating, and many species will need to adapt to survive. Ensuring that protected areas cover populations across a broad range of environmental conditions could safeguard the processes that lead to such adaptations. However, international conservation policies have largely neglected these considerations when setting targets for the expansion of protected areas. Here we show that—of 19,937 vertebrate species globally—the representation of environmental conditions across their habitats in protected areas (hereafter, niche representation) is inadequate for 4,836 (93.1%) amphibian, 8,653 (89.5%) bird and 4,608 (90.9%) terrestrial mammal species.