Abstract
Conservation efforts should target the few remaining areas of the world that represent outstanding examples of ecological integrity and aim to restore ecological integrity to a much broader area of the world with intact habitat and minimal species loss while this is still possible. There have been many assessments of “intactness” in recent years but most of these use measures of anthropogenic impact at a site, rather than faunal intactness or ecological integrity. This paper makes the first assessment of faunal intactness for the global terrestrial land surface and assesses how many ecoregions have sites that could qualify as Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs – sites contributing significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity) based on their outstanding ecological integrity (under KBA Criterion C). Three datasets are combined on species loss at sites to create a new spatially explicit map of numbers of species extirpated. Based on this map it is estimated that no more than 2.9% of the land surface can be considered to be faunally intact. Additionally, using habitat/density distribution data for 15 large mammals we also make an initial assessment of areas where mammal densities are reduced, showing a further decrease in surface area to 2.8% of the land surface that could be considered functionally intact. Only 11% of the functionally intact areas that were identified are included within existing protected areas, and only 4% within existing KBAs triggered by other criteria. Our findings show that the number of ecoregions that could qualify as Criterion C KBAs could potentially increase land area up to 20% if their faunal composition was restored with the reintroduction of 1–5 species. Hence, if all necessary requirements are met in order to reintroduce species and regain faunal integrity, this will increase ecological integrity across much of the area where human impacts are low (human footprint ≤4). Focusing restoration efforts in these areas could significantly increase the area of the planet with full ecological integrity.
Highlights
Intact ecosystems have long been recognized as an important conservation objective for protection
While wilderness areas are increasingly recognized as important for biodiversity conservation, few areas of the world remain that can be characterized as having outstanding ecological integrity
We found that only 2.8% of the terrestrial surface of the planet is represented in areas of 10,000 km2 or larger with low human footprint, no known species loss and no species known to be reduced below functional densities
Summary
Intact ecosystems have long been recognized as an important conservation objective for protection. The KBA Standard further defines “intact ecological community” as: “An ecological community having the complete complement of species known or expected to occur in a particular site or ecosystem, relative to a regionally appropriate historical benchmark, which will often correspond to pre-industrial times.”. The KBA Standard provides some guidance on how ecological integrity should be measured and states that it “should be observed or inferred from both direct measures of species composition and abundance/biomass across taxonomic groups ( for species indicative of long-term structural stability and functionality or those known to be highly sensitive to human impact) and absence (or very low levels) of direct industrial human impact (as quantified by appropriate indices at the scale of interest and verified on the ground or in the water).”. Species distributions have been changing for millennia because of human activity [e.g., the loss of large mammals across continents (Sandom et al, 2014)] and we chose to focus on changes that have occurred since the year 1500 AD, because this is the baseline date for assessing species extinctions within the IUCN Red List of Threatened species (IUCN, 2020)
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