Effectiveness of South Africa’s network of protected areas: Unassessed vascular plants predicted to be threatened using deep neural networks are all located in protected areas

Globally, biodiversity is at risk of extinction, and megadiverse countries become key targets for conservation. South Africa, the only country hosting three biodiversity hotspots, harbours tremendous diversity of at-risk species deserving to be protected. However, the lengthy risk assessment process and the lack of required data to complete assessments is a serious limitation to conservation since several species may slide into extinction while awaiting risk assessment. Here, we employed deep neural network model integrating species climatic and geographic features to predict the conservation status of 116 unassessed plant species. Our analysis involved in total 1072 plant species and 112 066 occurrence points. The best-performing model exhibits high accuracy, reaching up to 83.6% at the binary classification and 56.8% at the detailed classification. Our best-performing model predicts that 32% and 8% of Data Deficient and Not-Evaluated species are likely threatened, respectively, amounting to a proportion of 24.1% of unassessed species facing a risk of extinction. Interestingly, all unassessed species predicted to be threatened are in protected areas, revealing the effectiveness of the South Africa’s network of protected areas in conservation, although these likely threatened species are more abundant outside protected areas. Considering the limitation in assessing only species with available data, there remains a possibility of a higher proportion of unassessed species being imperiled.