Abstract
Between 1992 and 2015, nearly 148 million hectares (Mha) within biodiversity hotspots – biologically rich but threatened terrestrial regions – worldwide underwent land‐cover changes, equating to 6% of the total areal extent of hotspots. Forest losses in hotspots amounted to 54 Mha (–7% of the forest area present in 1992), driven primarily by agricultural expansion (38 Mha); shrubland or savanna also declined by 23 Mha (–8%). Over the same time, urban areas expanded by 10 Mha (+108%). Major losses in forest areas occurred in Sundaland (11 Mha, –13% relative to 1992), Indo‐Burma (6 Mha, –6%), and Mesoamerica (5 Mha, –7%). Approximately 7.5 Mha of forest loss occurred within protected areas (–5% of the respective forest area in 1992), of which 3.9 Mha was cleared between 2000 and 2015, with ~1 Mha alone converted in the 5 years after 2010. More stringent and effective land‐based policies are urgently needed to prevent additional landscape fragmentation and preserve existing species richness in the world's biodiversity hotspots.
Highlights
Biodiversity decline is one of the most urgent challenges for our society (Tilman et al, 2017), and biodiversity hotspots were introduced to identify priority areas where major conservation efforts should be allocated (Figure 1a) (Brooks et al, 2002; Myers, 2003; Myers et al, 2000)
In order to facilitate the interpretation of the land transitions occurred in the biodiversity hotspots, we aggregated the 37 United Nations Land Cover Classification System (UNLCCS) classes into the generic IPCC land classes, according to the specific cross-walking table provided by the European Space Agency (ESA) CCILC products (Defourny et al, 2017)
The land cover transitions are more reliable when they involve changes between land cover types that belong to different overarching IPCC classes, than between UNLCCS classes that belong to the same IPCC class
Summary
Biodiversity decline is one of the most urgent challenges for our society (Tilman et al, 2017), and biodiversity hotspots were introduced to identify priority areas where major conservation efforts should be allocated (Figure 1a) (Brooks et al, 2002; Myers, 2003; Myers et al, 2000). Abrupt biodiversity declines are most likely to occur where landscape fragmentation is already high and additional habitat losses can trigger non-linear responses from threatened endemic species (Betts et al, 2017; Brooks et al, 2002), such as in the biodiversity hotspots. Deforestation is one of the main drivers that accelerates species extinction (Betts et al, 2017; Brooks et al, 2002; Tracewski et al, 2016), and remotely sensed datasets of changes in forest areas are frequently integrated with biodiversity databases to estimate species responses at different scales (Betts et al, 2017; Tracewski et al, 2016). The lack of a consistent global land cover dataset limited existing studies to focus on one type of land cover class at a time (usually forests) (Betts et al, 2017; Tracewski et al, 2016), or to use coarser databases with simplified differentiations in land cover types and trends (Kobayashi et al, 2019)
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