Land use intensification increasingly drives the spatiotemporal patterns of the global human appropriation of net primary production in the last century

Abstract

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Scientists' warning of threats to mountains

“…Net primary production (NPP), the amount of biomass or carbon produced by primary producers per unit area and time, is the basis of all ecosystem services and is being altered due to climate change (Haberl et al, 2007;Kastner et al, 2022;Melillo et al, 1993). Overall, there is evidence that increasing temperatures and CO 2 concentrations have increased the NPP of forests when water was not a limiting factor (Boisvenue and Running, 2006).…”

A mid-20th century estimate of global vegetation carbon stocks based on inventory statistics

“…We undertake a global country-level BCS assessment considering above-ground biomass and below-ground biomass, while excluding carbon stored in litter, deadwood, soil, and harvested wood products. We combine contemporaneous statistical information on global land use Silva et al, 2011;Kastner et al, 2021b) (Table 1) to distinguish 8 major land categories, some of which are further sub-divided (Figure 1), in a closed-budget vegetation approach, which allocates terrestrial land areas into considered land categories. To each land category, we assign country-level carbon density values either from available datasets or assign them typical values from the literature.…”

“…Starting from their first signatures more than 12,000 years ago (Ellis, 2021), anthropogenic land cover change and land management have greatly impacted carbon dynamics in natural ecosystems. The extent and intensity of land use change has accelerated in the 20 th century (Houghton et al, 1983;Houghton and Nassikas, 2017;Kastner et al, 2021b). This acceleration is concomitant with increasing production, trade and consumption of biomass commodities (Krausmann and Langthaler, 2019;Kastner et al, 2021a) and a growth of resource use in general (Krausmann et al, 2013;Krausmann and Langthaler, 2019) over the last few decades.…”

Towards a global behavioural model of anthropogenic fire: The spatiotemporal distribution of land-fire systems

“…To ensure a fair comparison, one multinomial regression was fit per land use system. A brief description of the multinomial 10 model is available as Supplementary Material F. Second, model outputs were compared against independent data in the form of global maps of Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP; Kastner et al, 2021).…”

“…Here, we use global maps of HANPP to derive HANPPe for 1990, 2000 and 2010 (Haberl et al, 2007;Kastner et al, 2021). The compilation of these maps relied on the integration of census statistics (FAOSTAT, 2021) with information on potential ecosystem net primary production derived from a model run with the LPJ-GUESS DGVM (Smith et al, 2014) assuming a hypothetical no-land-use situation.…”