Abstract
Abstract Climate change and other anthropogenic drivers of biodiversity change are unequally distributed across the world. Overlap in the distributions of different drivers have important implications for biodiversity change attribution and the potential for interactive effects. However, the spatial relationships among different drivers and whether they differ between the terrestrial and marine realm has yet to be examined. We compiled global gridded datasets on climate change, land‐use, resource exploitation, pollution, alien species potential and human population density. We used multivariate statistics to examine the spatial relationships among the drivers and to characterize the typical combinations of drivers experienced by different regions of the world. We found stronger positive correlations among drivers in the terrestrial than in the marine realm, leading to areas with high intensities of multiple drivers on land. Climate change tended to be negatively correlated with other drivers in the terrestrial realm (e.g. in the tundra and boreal forest with high climate change but low human use and pollution), whereas the opposite was true in the marine realm (e.g. in the Indo‐Pacific with high climate change and high fishing). We show that different regions of the world can be defined by Anthropogenic Threat Complexes (ATCs), distinguished by different sets of drivers with varying intensities. We identify 11 ATCs that can be used to test hypotheses about patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem change, especially about the joint effects of multiple drivers. Our global analysis highlights the broad conservation priorities needed to mitigate the impacts of anthropogenic change, with different priorities emerging on land and in the ocean, and in different parts of the world.
Highlights
Human activities are reshaping biological communities and impacting ecosystem functioning across the Earth (Barnosky et al, 2011; Dornelas et al, 2014; Isbell et al, 2017)
We show that different regions of the world can be defined by Anthropogenic Threat Complexes (ATCs), distinguished by different sets of drivers with varying intensities
Our findings suggest that many drivers of biodiversity change are unlikely to act alone, but rather to jointly impact biological communities
Summary
Human activities are reshaping biological communities and impacting ecosystem functioning across the Earth (Barnosky et al, 2011; Dornelas et al, 2014; Isbell et al, 2017). Habitat change, exploitation, pollution and invasive alien species have been recognized as the most important and widespread direct anthropogenic causes of biodiversity change (IPBES, 2019; IPCC, 2013; Pereira, Navarro, & Martins, 2012) These five main drivers have been linked with changes in multiple dimensions of biodiversity, including genetic diversity, species' population sizes, community richness and ecosystem functioning (Pereira et al, 2012). Climate change is expected to be distributed differently to other variables because it is an outcome of processes at regional and global scales (IPCC, 2013) Towards these aims, we quantified the strengths of the spatial relationships among the intensities of variables related to different anthropogenic drivers: climate change, habitat conversion and exploitation (grouped together as ‘human use’), pollution and potential for alien species immigration (Table 1). By employing a standardized analysis for both realms, our study highlights similarities and differences in anthropogenic environmental changes across the world, including across realms
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