Climate and land-use change homogenise terrestrial biodiversity, with consequences for ecosystem functioning and human well-being

Abstract

Biodiversity continues to decline under the effect of multiple human pressures. We give a brief overview of the main pressures on biodiversity, before focusing on the two that have a predominant effect: land-use and climate change. We discuss how interactions between land-use and climate change in terrestrial systems are likely to have greater impacts than expected when only considering these pressures in isolation. Understanding biodiversity changes is complicated by the fact that such changes are likely to be uneven among different geographic regions and species. We review the evidence for variation in terrestrial biodiversity changes, relating differences among species to key ecological characteristics, and explaining how disproportionate impacts on certain species are leading to a spatial homogenisation of ecological communities. Finally, we explain how the overall losses and homogenisation of biodiversity, and the larger impacts upon certain types of species, are likely to lead to strong negative consequences for the functioning of ecosystems, and consequently for human well-being.

High Temporal Beta Diversity in an Ant Metacommunity, With Increasing Temporal Functional Replacement Along the Elevational Gradient

“…As there is growing evidence that climate change affects both temperature and precipitation regimes (e.g., Romero et al, 2020) and also the occurrence and intensity of extreme climatic events (e.g., Fischer and Knutti, 2015;Patricola and Wehner, 2018), we may expect that such increase in climatic variation and instability will drastically affect ant metacommunities. With this higher temporal variation in conditions and resources, we might lose the rarer and specialized species (Davies et al, 2004) that cannot survive the new environmental filter, leading to the homogenisation of the metacommunity (Newbold et al, 2019). In plants, generalist species tend to be functionally closer, i.e., have high functional redundancy (Denelle et al, 2020), and in assemblages with homogenized species composition we may observe a loss of functional traits and consequently, ecological functions (Newbold et al, 2019).…”

El Niño impacts on human‐modified tropical forests: Consequences for dung beetle diversity and associated ecological processes

“…Perhaps more importantly, our results support that local human‐driven disturbance and climate‐associated stressors can act together and influence tropical forest biodiversity and functioning. Thus, focusing on a single stressor may fail to capture the magnitude of the threat faced by tropical forests and their fauna (Barlow et al, ; Newbold et al, ), which are increasingly threatened by local human‐driven disturbances (Lewis et al, ) and are expected to have more frequent and extreme droughts in the next decades (Duffy et al, ).…”

Linkage between plant species diversity and soil-based functions along a post-agricultural succession is influenced by the vegetative forms

“…Although, many studies have explored the relationships between biodiversity and aboveground biomass (Morandi et al 2018;Wekesa et al 2019), especially in forests, the relationships between species diversity indices and soil-based functions have received much less attention. Similarly, the negative impact of land use change on diversity and ecosystem functions was largely investigated (Paudyal et al 2017;Newbold et al 2019), while studies on the relationships between plant species diversity and soil-based functions during the secondary succession from abandoned agricultural lands to forests were less frequent.…”