Human activity and climate change are widely considered to be main responsible for Galliformes bird extinction. Due to a decline in population, the Reeves’s Pheasant (Syrmaticus reevesii), a member of the Galliformes family, was recently elevated to first-class national protected status in China. However, determining their factor on extinction and provide remedy is challenging owing to the lack of long-term data with high spatial and temporal resolution. Here, based on national field survey we used habitat suitability models and integrated data on geographical environment, road development, land-use and climate change to predict potential changes from 1995 to 2050 in the distribution and connectivity of Reeves’s Pheasant habitat. Furthermore, ecological corridors were identified using the Minimum Cumulative Resistance (MCR) model. The priority of building ecological corridors was then determined by combining the ecological source and the network cost-weight importance index. The study results indicate that both intensified land-use and climate change were associated with the increased habitat loss of the Reeves’s Pheasant. In more recent decades, road construction and land-use changes have been linked to a rise in local extinction, and future climate change is predicted to cause the habitat to become even more fragmented and lose 89.58% of its total area. The ecological corridor for Reeves’s Pheasant will continue to decline by 88.55%. To counteract the negative effects of human activity and climate change on Reeves’s Pheasant survivorship, we recommend taking immediate action. This includes bolstering cooperation amongst provincial governments, restoring habitats, and creating ecological corridors amongst important habitat.

The clutch size, incubation rhythm of Reeves’s Pheasant (Syrmaticus reevesii) and their responses to ambient temperature and precipitationAbstract: Clutch size and incubation rhythm are critical components of avian life history. Incubating birds must balance the trade-offs between their energy requirements and the thermal needs of the developing embryos. Reeves’s Pheasant (Syrmaticus reevesii ) is a uniparental bird endemic to China that lives in mountain forests, and female Reeves’s Pheasants may adjust their incubation behavior to cope with cold environments and energy stress. Using satellite tracking, we tracked 21 wild female Reeves’s Pheasants in northern Hubei Province, China from 2020 to 2022, and explored the birds’ clutch size, incubation rhythm and their responses to ambient temperature and precipitation. The average clutch size of Reeves’s Pheasant was 7.72 ± 1.51, showing strong seasonal declines, and was markedly affected by the average temperature during the spawning period. During the incubation period, the females took 0.74 ± 0.46 recesses per day with an average recess duration of 99.23 ± 72.93 mins and an average nest attendance of 93.11 ± 5.06%. There was a peak of nest departures at around 13:00, and the recess duration was significantly negatively correlated with both daily mean temperature and daily precipitation. Our findings demonstrated that female Reeves’s Pheasants adjusted their behavior in response to the changing ambient temperature and precipitation, and the unimodal pattern of recess timing may not be driven primarily by the physiological needs of incubating females, but by the thermal needs of their developing embryos.Keywords: clutch size; incubation rhythm; response; ambient temperature and precipitation; Reeves’s Pheasant