Abstract
Predicting how species respond to human pressure is essential to anticipate their decline and identify appropriate conservation strategies. Both human pressure and extinction risk change over time, but their inter-relationship is rarely considered in extinction risk modelling. Here we measure the relationship between the change in terrestrial human footprint (HFP)—representing cumulative human pressure on the environment—and the change in extinction risk of the world’s terrestrial mammals. We find the values of HFP across space, and its change over time, are significantly correlated to trends in species extinction risk, with higher predictive importance than environmental or life-history variables. The anthropogenic conversion of areas with low pressure values (HFP < 3 out of 50) is the most significant predictor of change in extinction risk, but there are biogeographical variations. Our framework, calibrated on past extinction risk trends, can be used to predict the impact of increasing human pressure on biodiversity.
Highlights
Predicting how species respond to human pressure is essential to anticipate their decline and identify appropriate conservation strategies
We focus on terrestrial mammals as they have had their extinction risk measured over a similar period as HFP13, and they have served as a focal group in several previous extinction risk analyses[17]
We found that the extent of high human pressure within species ranges, and the change in this extent over time, were strong correlates of extinction risk transitions
Summary
Predicting how species respond to human pressure is essential to anticipate their decline and identify appropriate conservation strategies Both human pressure and extinction risk change over time, but their inter-relationship is rarely considered in extinction risk modelling. We measured the proportion of each species’ range overlap with high HFP values, and how this overlap has changed through time, testing all possible definitions of what constitutes ‘high HFP’ We used these values, and other known human pressure, environmental, and life-history predictors of risk (Table 1), to provide estimate of the extinction risk transitions of species as a function of change in human pressure within their distributions. We identified biogeographical differences in the best HFP threshold to determine areas of ‘high pressure’, which can be used for regional monitoring of extinction risk change
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