BEIJING: A total of 132 species of waterbirds were recorded last year in the Yellow River Basin, including 35 species under national protection and 19 species listed as globally threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
A total of 53 sites in the basin were identified as meeting the criteria for internationally important wetlands, with 13 of them in urgent need of effective protection measures.
These are part of the discoveries of the 2023 survey of waterbirds and their habitats in the Yellow River Basin released on Wednesday by the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Inner Mongolia Laoniu Charity Foundation in Beijing.
As one of the cradles of the Chinese civilization, the Yellow River Basin boasts many wetlands that lie on two bird migration routes: the East Asia-Australasia Flyway and the Central Asian Flyway, said Su Fenzhen, deputy director-general of the institute.
“These wetlands include offshore and coastal wetlands, rivers, lakes and marshes, serving as habitats for numerous rare and endangered waterbirds, such as the black-necked crane, the red-crowned crane, the Baer’s pochard, the Relict gull and Saunders’s gull,” Su said at a news conference in Beijing. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
