Global effects of land use on local terrestrial biodiversity

By Tim Newbold, Lawrence N. Hudson, S. Hill, S. Contu, I. Lysenko, R. Senior, L. Börger, D. Bennett, Argyrios Choimes, B. Collen and 31 more. Nature, 2015

3,803 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human activities, especially conversion and degradation of habitats, are causing global biodiversity declines. How local ecological assemblages are responding is less clear—a concern given their importance for many ecosystem functions and services. We analysed a terrestrial assemblage database of unprecedented geographic and taxonomic coverage to quantify local biodiversity responses to land use and related changes. Here we show that in the worst-affected habitats, these pressures reduce within-sample species richness by an average of 76.5%, total abundance by 39.5% and rarefaction-based richness by 40.3%. We estimate that, globally, these pressures have already slightly reduced average within-sample richness (by 13.6%), total abundance (10.7%) and rarefaction-based richness (8.1%), with changes showing marked spatial variation. Rapid further losses are predicted under a business-as-usual land-use scenario; within-sample richness is projected to fall by a further 3.4% globally by 2100, with losses concentrated in biodiverse but economically poor countries. Strong mitigation can deliver much more positive biodiversity changes (up to a 1.9% average increase) that are less strongly related to countries' socioeconomic status.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0045954b17b7eeebb8491a14d62024e3991aadfc

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Citations in the corpus

Deep Learning for Land Use and Land Cover Classification Based on Hyperspectral and Multispectral Earth Observation Data: A Review (2020, background): “Detrimental changes in land use and land cover are the leading contributors to terrestrial biodiversity losses [2], harms to ecosystem [3], and dramatic climate changes [4].”
Impacts of invasive biota in forest ecosystems in an aboveground–belowground context (2017, background): “jected to intensive land use or resource exploitation (Gerstner et al. 2014; Newbold et al. 2015).”
Global rangeland production systems and livelihoods at threat under climate change and variability (2020, background): “These systems are simultaneously important providers of ecosystems services, such as the maintenance of biodiversity (Alkemade et al 2013, Newbold et al 2015) and carbon storages compared with other production land uses (IPCC 2000, Garnett et al 2017).”
Amphibian sensitivity to habitat modification is associated with population trends and species traits (2017, methodology): “sections of reviews and syntheses (Gardner et al., 2007; Newbold et al., 2015) as well as “latest papers” on amphibian conservation listed”
Is local biodiversity declining or not? A summary of the debate over analysis of species richness time trends (2018, methodology): “When historical baselines are not available, we will need to use multiple types of data, including BACI designs and spatial references as others have done (Aronson et al., 2014; Murphy and Romanuk, 2014; Newbold et al., 2015).”
Biodiversity–ecosystem function experiments reveal the mechanisms underlying the consequences of biodiversity change in real world ecosystems (2016, neutral): “The third generation of BEF experiments took this criticism into account by establishing complex experiments designed to separate complementarity from sampling effects and functional group from species richness effects (e.g., Reich et al. 2004; Roscher et al. 2004).”