Species availability and socio-economics drive prosecutions for regional mammal and bird poaching across China, 2014–2020

The illegal poaching of vertebrate species for subsistence or economic trade presents a major global threat to biodiversity, ecosystem functionality and public health. Significant wildlife protection measures in China in recent decades have recovered various flagship species, threatened by poaching, from the brink of extinction. To achieve effective conservation interventions, and to avoid a pervasive and sometimes simplistic-narrative, it is essential to more fully understand the complex processes driving poaching across China. Using data relating to 6920 poaching offence prosecution cases involving mammals and/or birds between 2014 and 2020, we examined whether and how socio-economics and regional biodiversity affected poaching in terms of location of occurrence and number of poached species, while controlling for spatial autocorrelation effects. Ninety-five mammal and 451 bird species were poached in 242 and 292 of 338 prefectures, respectively. Between-prefecture variation in the occurrence and number of poached species was strongly associated with indicators of socio-economics, opportunity for consumption, and/or species availability. Mammal and bird poaching were most sensitive to different regional conditions: mammal poaching to the available biodiversity base and bird poaching to prefectural wealth. From our findings, we recommend prevention and control measures should be specifically targeted to take account of these prefectural and biodiversity-base effects on poaching of these taxa. In prefectures with richer biodiversity, alternative livelihoods to the subsistence hunting of mammals should be implemented, along with zoning residential development to avoid biodiverse areas. In wealthier prefectures, stricter policing and enforcement of bird trading would be most effective. This targeted action, to guide development and wildlife protection in China, and other similarly biodiverse countries, is essential to both reduce dependencies on poaching and demand from more affluent consumers.