Abstract
Human-induced environmental and climate change are widely blamed for causing rapid global biodiversity loss, but direct estimation of the proportion of biodiversity lost at local or regional scales are still infrequent. This prevents us from quantifying the main and interactive effects of anthropogenic environmental and climate change on species loss. Here, we demonstrate that the estimated proportion of species loss of 252 key protected vertebrate species at a county level of China during the past half century was 27.2% for all taxa, 47.7% for mammals, 28.8% for amphibians and reptiles and 19.8% for birds. Both human population increase and species richness showed significant positive correlations with species loss of all taxa combined, mammals, birds, and amphibians and reptiles. Temperature increase was positively correlated with all-taxa and bird species loss. Precipitation increase was negatively correlated with species loss of birds. Human population change and species richness showed more significant interactions with the other correlates of species loss. High species richness regions had higher species loss under the drivers of human environmental and climate change than low-richness regions. Consequently, ongoing human environmental and climate changes are expected to perpetuate more negative effects on the survival of key vertebrate species, particularly in high-biodiversity regions.
Highlights
Our planet is facing an accelerated decline in global biodiversity, which is threatening ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services, and human wellbeing [1]
Our data indicate that, during the past half century, middle-east and south-east China experienced a large increase of human population density (S1A Fig), northwest and northeast China experienced a large temperature increase (S1B Fig), and south and west China showed a large increase of precipitation (S1C Fig)
Our estimated percentage of species lost of 27.2% within about 50 years for 252 key terrestrial vertebrate species is comparable to an estimate that terrestrial vertebrate species declined in abundance by an average of 25% within 4 decades[4]
Summary
Our planet is facing an accelerated decline in global biodiversity, which is threatening ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services, and human wellbeing [1]. Global species extinction rates have rapidly increased during the past 200 years, to much higher levels than during the prehuman period [2,3,4,5,6]. Terrestrial vertebrates are known to have suffered the largest species loss or threat of extinction from human environmental change[4, 5] and climate.
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