Improving protected area effectiveness through consideration of different human‐pressure baselines.

DISCUSSION Effectiveness of PAs with different baselines Our results suggested that 170 of the 338 PAs (50.30%) had significant positive effects, including 150 PAs with low HPI baselines, 12 PAs with medium HPI baselines, and 8 PAs with high HPI baselines (Figure 2b). Our previous studies also showed that unlike PAs with high HPI or medium HPI baselines, PAs with low HPI baselines are more likely to have effective management if they have good patrol and surveillance, which helps control illegal threats in PAs (Wang et al., 2021). Compared with PAs with low HPI and medium HPI baselines, the area of forests in PAs with high HPI baselines of built-up area was relatively higher (Appendix S2). From 2010 to 2020, the rate of forest area decrease was the fastest for PAs with high HPI baselines, followed by PAs with medium HPI baselines and PAs with low HPI baselines (Figure 4a). [Extracted from the article]