The background of wildlife resources is the basis for effective management of biodiversity in nature reserves. In order to find out the latest situation of vertebrate resources in Qingmuchuan Nature Reserve and understand the protection effectiveness and main interference factors, we took field surveys from 2017 to 2018 by using the method of line transect and infrared camera trap. We also estimated the main threatening factors on wild vertebrates through analyzing the historical and social economic data, and evaluated the conservation effectiveness by using expert scoring method. We found that: (1) 342 species of wild vertebrates have been recorded in Qingmuchuan Nature Reserve, belonging to 5 classes, 32 orders, 91 families and 233 genera (Table 1), including 10 species and 41 species of national first-class and second-class key protected animals respectively (Table 2). Compared with the initial establishment of the reserve in 2002, 83 species, 46 genera, 9 families and 4 orders were added (Table 1). Among them, the number of bird species increased the most, up to 55 species; Only one species of amphibians was added (Table 1). (2) Tourism was the main economic activity in Qingmuchuan with the changes from 50 000 tourists in 2009 to 1 620 000 tourists in 2017 (Fig. 1). The tourism development in the periphery of the reserve has a certain potential impact on vertebrates and habitats in the reserve. (3) The land use pattern has changed significantly in the past 30 years. When the reserve was not established in 2001, the agricultural land area in the region accounted for about 33% of the total area, and only 1% in 2018 (Fig. 2). (4) The main threatening factor to wild animals in the reserve has changed from agriculture and farming to the current peripheral tourism development during past 20 years (Table 3), and the evaluation analysis showed that the reserve is with higher score of conservation effectiveness (Table 4).