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Background: Historical and contemporary climates may shape the distributional patterns of plant species richness across different scales. However, few studies have focused on the effects of historical and contemporary climate changes on the distributional patterns of plant richness in Chinese protected areas across different taxonomic levels.

Hypotheses: Historical and contemporary climates can have an important legacy effect on the large-scale distributional patterns of plant richness across different taxonomic levels.

Studied species: Vascular plants.

Study site: China.

Method: We used data on plant richness at the family, genus, and species levels from Chinese protected areas and applied regression modelling to explore the relationships between climate change and plant richness among vascular, fern, seed, gymnosperm, and angiosperm plants based on paleoclimate (Last Glacial Maximum; LGM, ca. 22,000 years ago) and contemporary climate data.

Results: The large-scale distributional patterns of plant richness could be predicted across different taxonomic levels on the basis of paleoclimate and contemporary climate data. Specifically, historical and contemporary climate variables were found to better correlate with fern plant richness than seed plant richness. For seed plants, the explanatory power of historical and contemporary climate variables was found to be stronger for the richness of gymnosperms than for the richness of angiosperms.

Conclusions: The distributional pattern of plant richness could be predicted across different taxonomic levels after including paleoclimate (LGM, ca. 22,000 years ago) and contemporary climate data from China. Our study could support the effectiveness of the management of protected areas in China.