Abstract
Conserving threatened species requires identifying where across their range they are being impacted by threats, yet this remains unresolved across most of Earth. Here, we present a global analysis of cumulative human impacts on threatened species by using a spatial framework that jointly considers the co-occurrence of eight threatening processes and the distribution of 5,457 terrestrial vertebrates. We show that impacts to species are widespread, occurring across 84% of Earth’s surface, and identify hotspots of impacted species richness and coolspots of unimpacted species richness. Almost one-quarter of assessed species are impacted across >90% of their distribution, and approximately 7% are impacted across their entire range. These results foreshadow localised extirpations and potential extinctions without conservation action. The spatial framework developed here offers a tool for defining strategies to directly mitigate the threats driving species’ declines, providing essential information for future national and global conservation agendas.
Highlights
Human activities and land usage are exerting unprecedented pressure on natural environments [1,2], threatening to drive tens of thousands of species to extinction [3]
Our understanding of where these ‘threats’ impact sensitive species is extremely limited across Earth
1,237 species are impacted by threats across >90% of their distribution, and 395 species are impacted by threats across their entire range
Summary
Human activities and land usage are exerting unprecedented pressure on natural environments [1,2], threatening to drive tens of thousands of species to extinction [3]. Understanding and quantifying spatial patterns of where human pressures overlap with sensitive species (i.e., mapping human impacts to threatened species) will improve our ability to prioritise actions to manage and mitigate human impacts on biodiversity [6,7]. It will allow for the identification of areas across species distributions that are free from those threats that the species is sensitive to, and this information can be used to map global ‘coolspots’ of what we call ‘threat refugia’. Both forms of information are essential for conservation planning and can guide action towards securing these impact-free refugia, which are paramount for the survival of many threatened species [8,9,10,11]
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