Relative effects of land conversion and land-use intensity on terrestrial vertebrate diversity

Abstract

Land-use has transformed ecosystems over three quarters of the terrestrial surface, with massive repercussions on biodiversity. Land-use intensity is known to contribute to the effects of land-use on biodiversity, but the magnitude of this contribution remains uncertain. Here, we use a modified countryside species-area model to compute a global account of the impending biodiversity loss caused by current land-use patterns, explicitly addressing the role of land-use intensity based on two sets of intensity indicators. We find that land-use entails the loss of ~15% of terrestrial vertebrate species from the average 5 × 5 arcmin-landscape outside remaining wilderness areas and ~14% of their average native area-of-habitat, with a risk of global extinction for 556 individual species. Given the large fraction of global land currently used under low land-use intensity, we find its contribution to biodiversity loss to be substantial (~25%). While both sets of intensity indicators yield similar global average results, we find regional differences between them and discuss data gaps. Our results support calls for improved sustainable intensification strategies and demand-side actions to reduce trade-offs between food security and biodiversity conservation.

The impact of land use on non-native species incidence and number in local assemblages worldwide

“…Human LU – mainly land conversion and subsequent management for crop cultivation and livestock raising – has been identified as the strongest driver of biodiversity loss in terrestrial ecosystems 3 , 6 , 9 by destroying, degrading and fragmenting species’ habitats across at least three quarters of the earth’s ice-free land mass 10 . However, the conversion of natural ecosystems or the management of converted ones does not affect all species equally, as some species may tolerate the novel environmental conditions while others may not 11 .…”

“…The Anthropocene biodiversity crisis is driven by various facets of human activity such as direct exploitation of organisms, transformation of pristine to modified ecosystems, environmental pollution, alteration of the Earth's climate and human translocation of species beyond their native distributions 1,2 . These drivers of biodiversity change are expected to interact with each other [3][4][5][6][7] . However, much of the research linking drivers to biodiversity change has either focused on individual drivers 3 , or on the interaction between land use (henceforth abbreviated as LU) and climate change 8,9 .…”

Recent Developments and Challenges in Projecting the Impact of Crop Productivity Growth on Biodiversity Considering Market-Mediated Effects

“…Even the models quantifying land use driven species richness loss on local, regional, and global scales suffer from several limitations owing to model structure and parameter uncertainties. ,, Harmonized and validated high spatial-resolution maps of cropland use intensity need to be constructed through collaboration between scientific communities such as geography, remote sensing, Earth, and land system science, that can be fed into ecological models such as the species-area relationship (SAR) to obtain more accurate cropland driven species threat estimates at a finer grid scale than terrestrial ecoregions. − The area of habitat (AOH) maps of species need to be improved to represent the actual occurrence of individual species across the Earth along with the collection of more information on the affinity (tolerance) of different species to different human land uses with varying intensity levels . Finally, apart from land use and habitat loss driven biodiversity impacts, loss of species due to use of fertilizers and pesticides at the farm level needs to be included in biodiversity assessment in order to obtain a comprehensive picture of the damage caused by crop intensification to global and regional biodiversity.…”

Impacts of Scaling up Agroecology on the Sustainability of European Agriculture in 2050

“…Additionally, a proxy indicator for biodiversity pressures was calculated, i.e. the ratio of the total amount of primary biomass harvest and the potential NPP in a region (Mayer et al, 2021a;Semenchuk et al, 2022). A detailed description of the BioBaM-GHG 2.0 is provided by (Kalt et al, 2021).…”