Abstract
The main paradigm for protection of biodiversity, focusing on maintaining or restoring conditions where humans leave no or little impact, risks overlooking anthropogenic landscapes harboring a rich native biodiversity. An example is northern European agricultural landscapes with traditionally managed semi-natural grasslands harboring an exceptional local richness of many taxa, such as plants, fungi and insects. During the last century these grasslands have declined by more than 95%, i.e. in the same magnitude as other, internationally more recognized declines of natural habitats. In this study, data from the Swedish Red List was used to calculate tentative extinction rates for vascular plants, insects (Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Hymenoptera) and fungi, given a scenario where such landscapes would vanish. Conservative estimates suggest that abandonment of traditional management in these landscapes would result in elevated extinction rates in all these taxa, between two and three orders of magnitude higher than global background extinction rates. It is suggested that the species richness in these landscapes reflects a species pool from Pleistocene herbivore-structured environments, which, after the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna, was rescued by the introduction of pre-historic agriculture. Maintaining traditionally managed agricultural landscapes is of paramount importance to prevent species loss. There is no inherent conflict between preservation of anthropogenic landscapes and remaining ‘wild’ areas, but valuating also anthropogenic landscapes is essential for biodiversity conservation.
Highlights
The current discourse on global biodiversity decline is strongly focused on anthropogenic impacts as a major threat and that actions need to be taken to reduce these impacts
The objective of this paper is to examine the potential loss of species, assessed as projected species extinction rates, if traditional agricultural landscapes would cease to exist, using Sweden as an example
157 species (36.2%) are threatened and at least partly dependent on traditional agricultural landscapes. Assuming that these species would disappear if these landscapes vanished, that would imply that c. 10% of vascular plant species in Sweden went extinct
Summary
The current discourse on global biodiversity decline is strongly focused on anthropogenic impacts as a major threat and that actions need to be taken to reduce these impacts. Anthropogenic transformation of natural habitats is a main driver behind global species loss (Brummitt et al 2015; IPBES 2019) and projected species extinction rates are estimated to be several orders of magnitude higher than background extinction rates (Pereira et al 2010; Barnosky et al 2011; Pimm et al 2014; Ceballos et al 2015; Humphreys et al 2019) To counteract this loss of biodiversity, a dominating course of action is to preserve remaining ‘wild’ areas and to strive toward increasing these, e.g. by ‘giving back land to nature’ (e.g. Wilson 2016; Pimm et al 2018), by prioritizing land sparing A starting-point for the present paper is that it would be valuable to have quantitative assessments of the effects on biodiversity of abandonment of traditionally managed anthropogenic landscapes, using approaches similar to the global assessments of species extinctions mentioned above
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