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China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) sets to create connections and build infrastructure across Eurasia, Asia, and parts of the African continent in its initial phase and is the largest infrastructure project of all time. Any infrastructure project on this scale will necessarily pass through ecofragile regions and key biodiversity areas (KBAs). This creates an imperative to identify possible areas of impact and probable effects on conservation values to facilitate adaptive planning and to mitigate, minimize, or avoid impacts. Using the highest resolution route maps of the BRI available, I overlaid the proposed road and rail routes on KBAs, protected areas, and predicted biodiversity hotspots for over 4138 animal and 7371 plant species. I also assessed the relationship between the proposed route with the distribution of mines across BRI countries and the proportion of deforestation and forest near routes. Infrastructure, especially mining, was clustered near the proposed route; thus, construction and development along the route may increase the size and number of mines. Up to 15% of KBAs were within 1 km of proposed railways. Thus, planned and probable development along the routes may pose a significant risk to biodiversity, especially because the majority of KBAs are unprotected. Many biodiversity hotspots for different taxa were near the route. These hotspots varied between taxa, making systematic management and environmental impact assessments an effective strategy for at least some taxa. A combination of planning and mitigation strategies will likely be necessary to protect the most important areas for biodiversity proximal to development, especially in currently unprotected KBAs and other regions that need protection. A fuller assessment of trade‐offs between conservation and other values will be necessary to make good decisions for each project and site being developed, including potentially modifying parts of the route to minimize impacts. Modification or foregoing of infrastructure may be needed if stakeholders consider the conservation costs too high. Article impact statement: Mitigating consequences to biodiversity of the largest ever global infrastructure project requires site‐based solutions and impact assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and goal: The study is conducted to facilitate conservation of migratory wader species along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, particularly to 1) Identify hotspots of wader species richness along the flyway and effectively map how these might change between breeding, non-breeding and migratory phases; 2) Determine if the existing network of protected areas (PA) is sufficient to effectively conserve wader biodiversity hotspots along the EAAF; 3) Assess how species distribution models can provide complementary distribution estimates to existing BirdLife range maps. Methods: We use a species distribution modelling (SDM) approach (MaxEnt) to develop temporally explicit individual range maps of 57 migratory wader species across their annual cycle, including breeding, non-breeding and migratory phases, which in turn provide the first biodiversity hotspot map of migratory waders along the EAAF for each of these phases. We assess the protected area coverage during each migration period, and analyse the dominant environmental drivers of distributions for each period. Additionally, we compare model hotspots to those existing range maps of the same species obtained from the BirdLife Internationals’ database. Results: Our model results indicate an overall higher and a spatially different species richness pattern compared to that derived from a wader biodiversity hotspot map based on BirdLife range maps. Field observation records from the eBird database for our 57 study species confirm many of the hotspots revealed by model outputs (especially within the Yellow Sea coastal region), suggesting that current richness of the EAAF may have been underestimated and certain hotspots overlooked. Less than 10% of the terrestrial zones area (inland and coastal) which support waders are protected and, only 5% of areas with the highest 10% species richness is protected. Main conclusions: The study results suggest the need for new areas for migratory wader research and conservation priorities including Yellow Sea region and Russian far-East. It also suggests a need to increase the coverage and percentage of current PA network to achieve Aichi Target 11 for Flyway countries, including giving stronger consideration to the temporal dynamics of wader migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]