Research Article

Copyright © 2013 Youhua Chen.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The extinction risk of endemic birds of mainland China was modeled over evolutionary time. Results showed that extinction risk of endemic birds in mainland China always tended to be similar within subclades over the evolutionary time of species divergence, and the overall evolution of extinction risk of species presented a conservatism pattern, as evidenced by the disparity-through-time plot. A constant-rate evolutionary model was the best one to quantify the evolution of extinction risk of endemic birds of mainland China. Thus, there was no rate shifting pattern for the evolution of extinction risk of Chinese endemic birds over time. In a summary, extinction risk of endemic birds of mainland China is systematically quantified under the evolutionary framework in the present work. 1