On May 22, the Ministry of Environment Protection (MEP) held a commemoration meeting on Biodiversity Day in Beijing. The meeting was hosted by MEP Deputy Minister Ganjie Li. Minister Jining Chen, the executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Braulio Ferreira De Souza Dias, the Director of China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation Deping Hu, Vice Director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Erwei Shi attended the meeting and delivered speeches. More than 150 participants from the secretariat of CBD, the United Nations agencies in China, and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other domestic and foreign organizations participated in the meeting.

Mr. Erwei Shi announced that Catalogue of Life China 2015 Annual Checklist and Chinese Biodiversity Red List was officially released by CAS and MEP.

Compiling species checklist is an important content of biodiversity monitoring, it is the basis and a significant part of species conservation. Through it, the biodiversity situation in China could be revealed, helping the implementation of CBD missions and biodiversity conservation planning. Biodiversity Committee, CAS, has organized experts compiling the Catalogue of Life China since 2007 and published an electronic version of the annual checklist every year since 2008. The annual checklist provides the taxonomy and distribution of the animals, plants and microbiology in China, making China to be the only country that publish annual species checklist for many continuous years. There are 73255 species and 10035 infraspecific taxa in 2015 Annual Checklist, including 35710 plant species (covering the entire wild higher plants and important cultivated plants). The summary and review of plant species is organized by the Species Information and Rapid Identification Group, State Key Laboratory of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, CAS.

The Red List mainly refers to the use of IUCN Red List criteria to assess the species extinction risk. It is a significant basis for planning biodiversity conservation priority. The newly released Chinese Biodiversity Red List includes higher plants and vertebrates, organized by Institute of Botany and Institute of Zoology respectively. The higher plant red list covers 34450 species (including infraspecific species). In the list, 52 species are listed as extinct ranks (Extinct (EX), Extinct in the Wild (EW), Regionally Extinct (RE)), which accounts 0.15% of the whole flora. 3767 are threatened ranks (Critically Endangered (CR), Endangered (EN) and Vulnerable (VU)) and accounts 10.93%. 294 experts were involved in the project to submit the species data and check the assessment result, guaranteeing the accuracy and authority of the project. Also, there are 3610 species (11%) listed as Data Deficient (DD) categories due to the lack of research.

Catalogue of Life China 2015 Annual Checklist and China Biodiversity Red List hasa profound impact on biodiversity conservation and management, provides scientific basis forthegovernment and related departments to formulate conservation policy and planning.