TY - JOUR
T1 - Global effects of land use on local terrestrial biodiversity
AU - Newbold, Tim
AU - Hudson, Lawrence N.
AU - Hill, Samantha L.L.
AU - Contu, Sara
AU - Lysenko, Igor
AU - Senior, Rebecca A.
AU - Börger, Luca
AU - Bennett, Dominic J.
AU - Choimes, Argyrios
AU - Collen, Ben
AU - Day, Julie
AU - De Palma, Adriana
AU - Díaz, Sandra
AU - Echeverria-Londoño, Susy
AU - Edgar, Melanie J.
AU - Feldman, Anat
AU - Garon, Morgan
AU - Harrison, Michelle L.K.
AU - Alhusseini, Tamera
AU - Ingram, Daniel J.
AU - Itescu, Yuval
AU - Kattge, Jens
AU - Kemp, Victoria
AU - Kirkpatrick, Lucinda
AU - Kleyer, Michael
AU - Correia, David Laginha Pinto
AU - Martin, Callum D.
AU - Meiri, Shai
AU - Novosolov, Maria
AU - Pan, Yuan
AU - Phillips, Helen R.P.
AU - Purves, Drew W.
AU - Robinson, Alexandra
AU - Simpson, Jake
AU - Tuck, Sean L.
AU - Weiher, Evan
AU - White, Hannah J.
AU - Ewers, Robert M.
AU - MacE, Georgina M.
AU - Scharlemann, Jörn P.W.
AU - Purvis, Andy
N1 - Funding Information: Acknowledgements We thank all the many researchers who have made their data available to us; S. Butchart and Birdlife International for sharing bird body-size data; F. Gilbert for hoverfly body-sizedata; theIMAGE,HYDE, MESSAGE andMiniCAM teams, especially R. Alkemade, M. Bakkenes and A. Thomson for sharing additional data from their integrated assessment models; D. Tittensor for statistical advice; C. Sleep and S. Patlola at the Natural History Museum in London for IT support with the database; members of the GARD initiative (http://www.gardinitiative.org/index.html) for help with estimating the reptile species richness map; K. Jones, J. Tylianakis, M. Crawley and E. J. Milner-Gulland for discussion, N. Burgess for comments on a draft of the paper. We also thank C. D. Thomas and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on the manuscript. This study is part of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity in Changing Terrestrial Systems) project, which is supported by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC, grant number: NE/J011193/1), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (grant number: BB/ F017324/1) a Hans Rausing PhD scholarship. The study was also supported by the TRY initiative on plant traits, whose database is maintained at Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany, and which is supported by DIVERSITAS, IGBP, the Global Land Project, NERC, the French Foundation for Biodiversity Research, and GIS ‘Climat, Environnement et Société’ France. This is a contribution from the Imperial College Grand Challenges in Ecosystem and the Environment Initiative. Publisher Copyright: © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
PY - 2015/4/2
Y1 - 2015/4/2
N2 - Human activities, especially conversion and degradation of habitats, are causing global biodiversity declines. How local ecological assemblages are responding is less clear - a concern given their importance for many ecosystem functions and services. We analysed a terrestrial assemblage database of unprecedented geographic and taxonomic coverage to quantify local biodiversity responses to land use and related changes. Here we show that in the worst-affected habitats, these pressures reduce within-sample species richness by an average of 76.5%, total abundance by 39.5% and rarefaction-based richness by 40.3%. We estimate that, globally, these pressures have already slightly reduced average within-sample richness (by 13.6%), total abundance (10.7%) and rarefaction-based richness (8.1%), with changes showing marked spatial variation. Rapid further losses are predicted under a business-as-usual land-use scenario; within-sample richness is projected to fall by a further 3.4% globally by 2100, with losses concentrated in biodiverse but economically poor countries. Strong mitigation can deliver much more positive biodiversity changes (up to a 1.9% average increase) that are less strongly related to countries' socioeconomic status.
AB - Human activities, especially conversion and degradation of habitats, are causing global biodiversity declines. How local ecological assemblages are responding is less clear - a concern given their importance for many ecosystem functions and services. We analysed a terrestrial assemblage database of unprecedented geographic and taxonomic coverage to quantify local biodiversity responses to land use and related changes. Here we show that in the worst-affected habitats, these pressures reduce within-sample species richness by an average of 76.5%, total abundance by 39.5% and rarefaction-based richness by 40.3%. We estimate that, globally, these pressures have already slightly reduced average within-sample richness (by 13.6%), total abundance (10.7%) and rarefaction-based richness (8.1%), with changes showing marked spatial variation. Rapid further losses are predicted under a business-as-usual land-use scenario; within-sample richness is projected to fall by a further 3.4% globally by 2100, with losses concentrated in biodiverse but economically poor countries. Strong mitigation can deliver much more positive biodiversity changes (up to a 1.9% average increase) that are less strongly related to countries' socioeconomic status.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84926360683
U2 - 10.1038/nature14324
DO - 10.1038/nature14324
M3 - Article
C2 - 25832402
SN - 0028-0836
VL - 520
SP - 45
EP - 50
JO - Nature
JF - Nature
IS - 7545
ER -