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, we are in the midst of a biodiversity crisis and megadiverse countries become key targets for conservation. South Africa, the only country in the world hosting three biodiversity hotspots within its borders, harbours a 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 a 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 of 1072 plant species and 96,938 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 at the binary classification predicts that 32% (25 species) and 8% (3 species) of Data Deficient and Not-Evaluated species respectively, are likely threatened, 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 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 imperilled.