Assessing Habitat Vulnerability and Loss of Naturalness: Applying the GLOBIO3 Model in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Global and regional biodiversity loss is caused by several drivers including urban development, land use intensification, overexploitation of natural resources, environmental pollution, and climate change. The main aim of our study was to adapt the GLOBIO3 model to the conditions of the Czech Republic (CR) to assess loss of naturalness and biodiversity vulnerability at the habitat level on a detailed scale across the entire CR. An additional aim was to assess the main drivers affecting the biodiversity of habitat types. The GLOBIO3 model was adapted to CZ-GLOBIO by adapting global to local scales and using habitat quality and naturalness data instead of species occurrence data. The total mean species abundance (MSA) index of habitat quality, calculated from the spatial overlay of the four MSA indicators by our new equation, reached the value 0.62. The total value of MSA for natural and near-natural habitats was found to be affected mainly by infrastructure development and fragmentation. Simultaneously, intensity of land use change and atmospheric nitrogen deposition contributed primarily to the low total value of MSA for distant natural habitats. The CZ-GLOBIO model can be an important tool in political decision making to reduce the impact of the main drivers on habitat biodiversity in the CR.

Application of the CZ-Globio Model in Beskydy Protected Landscape Area

“…The results of the study show that the spatially weighted average value of the MSATOT index in the Beskydy PLA is still high (0.7). However, low MSALU values (0.9) indicate a significant reduction in biodiversity compared to the original natural habitats, which is also confirmed by Pechanec et al (2016Pechanec et al ( , 2021. On the basis of our research (study of "Care plans of PLA" and spatial planning documents in the region) it can be claimed, that a frequent cause of biodiversity degradation in the Beskydy PLA is land conversion in the context of agriculture and furthermore urbanization (expansion of housing developments).…”

“…The Detailed Combined Layer (DCL) of habitats from 2018 was used for the area of interest. This layer contains data on 152 habitat types across the country (Pechanec et al, 2021). Of the five drivers originally proposed, four were used: (i) Land use change (MSALU), (ii) Infrastructure development (MSAI), (iii) Landscape fragmentation (MSAF), (iv) Atmospheric nitrogen deposition (MSAN).…”

“…According to Alkemade et al, it is a simple product of values. By adapting the model to Czech conditions -CZ-GLOBIO, the MSA indicator in this study was determined based on habitat naturalness, and accordingly, it was more appropriate to use the central limit theorem equation in arithmetic space to calculate the MSATOT indicator (Pechanec et al, 2021): the MSATOT indicator by equation (Pechanec et al, 2021): Data on the quality of natural, near-natural alien and non-natural habitats were used to calculate MSALU based on their representativeness and preservation status, While representativeness is defined as the extent to which the assessed habitat matches the description of the natural habitat type according to the Catalogue of Habitats of the Czech Republic (Chytrý et al, 2010) and preservation value assesses the conservation status of the habitat. For non-natural and natural alien habitats, values were directly assigned according to expert conversion tables.…”

“…The persistent changes can be registered, quantified and assessed to some extent by using geoinformation technologies and models designed to simulate and predict processes or phenomena in the context of potential biodiversity loss or the selection of unprotected ecologically valuable areas for protection. The quantitative environmental impact assessment models, which are contemporarily being developed aim to exactly inform decision-makers, especially state experts in the field of environmental protection (Pechanec et al, 2016), and thus effectively support policy decisions on global human impacts on biodiversity to maintain generally sustainable development on Earth. This involves working with geographic data in a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) environment.…”

Functional Connectivity of Naturally Valuable Habitats in the Jeseníky Protected Landscape Area

“…The evaluation was conducted on the strength of a pre-prepared Detailed combined map of habitats (DCL) on a scale of 1: 10,000 for the entire CR and a related knowledge database regarding the level of loss of natural character of individual habitats. A description of the structure and content of this dataset can be found, for example, in Cudlín et al (2020) or Pechanec et al (2021). It is a detailed layer containing 194 (156 natural and 38 non-natural) habitat types, currently composed of 3,397,852 segments.…”