Abstract
Land-use has transformed ecosystems over three quarters of the terrestrial surface, with massive repercussions on biodiversity. Land-use intensity is known to contribute to the effects of land-use on biodiversity, but the magnitude of this contribution remains uncertain. Here, we use a modified countryside species-area model to compute a global account of the impending biodiversity loss caused by current land-use patterns, explicitly addressing the role of land-use intensity based on two sets of intensity indicators. We find that land-use entails the loss of ~15% of terrestrial vertebrate species from the average 5 × 5 arcmin-landscape outside remaining wilderness areas and ~14% of their average native area-of-habitat, with a risk of global extinction for 556 individual species. Given the large fraction of global land currently used under low land-use intensity, we find its contribution to biodiversity loss to be substantial (~25%). While both sets of intensity indicators yield similar global average results, we find regional differences between them and discuss data gaps. Our results support calls for improved sustainable intensification strategies and demand-side actions to reduce trade-offs between food security and biodiversity conservation.
Highlights
Summary statistics mentioned in the text and Supplementary Data 1, 5 and 6 were calculated as follows
Biome-wide and nation-wide average species losses due to conversion, LU-intensity or both were calculated as cell-area weighted means across all cells with native terrestrial vertebrate species either excluding or including wilderness areas
The percentual land area exceeding a certain threshold of calculated SR decline were calculated by dividing the area sum of all cells exceeding that threshold by the area sum of all cells with native species excluding wilderness
Summary
To explore the scale of potential species losses triggered by future LU intensification, we re-run the cSAR-model under an explorative counterfactual scenario in which we assume that all currently used land is used with high intensity (Methods) while the extent and type of LU remain as they are today Under these assumptions, the average species loss increases from 14.6–15.1% to 26.6% (Supplementary Data 1), and the impact caused by LUintensity rises from 3.4 to 3.8 % under current LU-intensity to 15.4% (Supplementary Data 1). Differences exist: when considering global averages, calculations with Set 2 yield slightly higher total average species loss caused by higher intensity effects in five of the six LU-types (Supplementary Data 1). Among LU-types, differences are statistically significant and pastures trigger the strongest AOH reductions (5.9%-points, CI 5.6–6.2%-points), followed by cropland (3.1%-points, CI 2.8–3.3%-points) (Supplementary Data 3)
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