Publications
244 results found
Pereira HM, Rosa IMD, Martins IS, et al., 2020, Global trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services from 1900 to 2050
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Despite the scientific consensus on the extinction crisis and its anthropogenic origin, the quantification of historical trends and of future scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services has been limited, due to the lack of inter-model comparisons and harmonized scenarios. Here, we present a multi-model analysis to assess the impacts of land-use and climate change from 1900 to 2050. During the 20th century provisioning services increased, but biodiversity and regulating services decreased. Similar trade-offs are projected for the coming decades, but they may be attenuated in a sustainability scenario. Future biodiversity loss from land-use change is projected to keep up with historical rates or reduce slightly, whereas losses due to climate change are projected to increase greatly. Renewed efforts are needed by governments to meet the 2050 vision of the Convention on Biological Diversity.</jats:p><jats:sec><jats:title>One Sentence Summary</jats:title><jats:p>Development pathways exist that allow for a reduction of the rates of biodiversity loss from land-use change and improvement in regulating services but climate change poses an increasing challenge.</jats:p></jats:sec>
Newbold T, Bentley LF, Hill SLL, et al., 2020, Global effects of land use on biodiversity differ among functional groups, FUNCTIONAL ECOLOGY, Vol: 34, Pages: 684-693, ISSN: 0269-8463
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- Citations: 60
Sánchez-Ortiz K, Taylor KJM, De Palma A, et al., 2019, Effects of land-use change and related pressures on alien and native subsets of island communities
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Island species and habitats are particularly vulnerable to human disturbances, and anthropogenic changes are increasingly overwriting natural island biogeographic patterns. However, quantitative comparisons of how native and alien assemblages respond to human disturbances are scarce. Using data from 6,242 species of vertebrates, invertebrates and plants, from 7,718 sites on 81 islands, we model how land-use change, human population density and distance to the nearest road affect local assemblages of alien and native species on islands. We found that land-use change reduces both richness and abundance of native species, whereas the number and abundance of alien species are high in plantation forests and agricultural or urban sites. In contrast to the long-established pattern for native species (i.e., decline in species number with island isolation), more isolated islands have more alien species across most land uses than do less isolated islands. We show that alien species play a major role in the turnover of island assemblages: our models show that aliens outnumber natives among the species present at disturbed sites but absent from minimally-disturbed primary vegetation. Finally, we found a homogenization pattern for both native and alien assemblages across sites within most land uses. The declines of native species on islands in the face of human pressures, and the particular proneness to invasions of the more remote islands, highlight the need to reduce the intensity of human pressures on islands and to prevent the introduction and establishment of alien species.</jats:p>
Diaz S, Settele J, Brondizio ES, et al., 2019, Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change, SCIENCE, Vol: 366, Pages: 1327-+, ISSN: 0036-8075
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- Citations: 951
Díaz S, Settele J, Brondízio ES, et al., 2019, Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change., Science, Vol: 366
The human impact on life on Earth has increased sharply since the 1970s, driven by the demands of a growing population with rising average per capita income. Nature is currently supplying more materials than ever before, but this has come at the high cost of unprecedented global declines in the extent and integrity of ecosystems, distinctness of local ecological communities, abundance and number of wild species, and the number of local domesticated varieties. Such changes reduce vital benefits that people receive from nature and threaten the quality of life of future generations. Both the benefits of an expanding economy and the costs of reducing nature's benefits are unequally distributed. The fabric of life on which we all depend-nature and its contributions to people-is unravelling rapidly. Despite the severity of the threats and lack of enough progress in tackling them to date, opportunities exist to change future trajectories through transformative action. Such action must begin immediately, however, and address the root economic, social, and technological causes of nature's deterioration.
Bayley DT, Mogg AOM, Purvis A, et al., 2019, Evaluating the efficacy of small-scale marine protected areas for preserving reef health: A case study applying emerging monitoring technology, AQUATIC CONSERVATION-MARINE AND FRESHWATER ECOSYSTEMS, Vol: 29, Pages: 2026-2044, ISSN: 1052-7613
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- Citations: 12
Hill SLL, Arnell A, Maney C, et al., 2019, Measuring Forest Biodiversity Status and Changes Globally, FRONTIERS IN FORESTS AND GLOBAL CHANGE, Vol: 2
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- Citations: 31
Purvis A, Butchart SHM, Brondizio ES, et al., 2019, No inflation of threatened species, SCIENCE, Vol: 365, Pages: 767-767, ISSN: 0036-8075
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- Citations: 4
Newbold T, Sanchez-Ortiz K, De Palma A, et al., 2019, Reply to 'The biodiversity intactness index may underestimate losses', NATURE ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION, Vol: 3, Pages: 864-865, ISSN: 2397-334X
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- Citations: 7
Simmons BI, Balmford A, Bladon AJ, et al., 2019, Worldwide insect declines: An important message, but interpret with caution, ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION, Vol: 9, Pages: 3678-3680, ISSN: 2045-7758
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- Citations: 66
Jung M, Rowhani P, Newbold T, et al., 2019, Local species assemblages are influenced more by past than current dissimilarities in photosynthetic activity, Ecography, ISSN: 0906-7590
© 2018 The Authors Most land on Earth has been changed by humans and past changes of land can have lasting influences on current species assemblages. Yet few globally representative studies explicitly consider such influences even though auxiliary data, such as from remote sensing, are readily available. Time series of satellite-derived data have been commonly used to quantify differences in land-surface attributes such as vegetation cover, which will among other things be influenced by anthropogenic land conversions and modifications. Here we quantify differences in current and past (up to five years before sampling) vegetation cover, and assess whether such differences differentially influence taxonomic and functional groups of species assemblages between spatial pairs of sites. Specifically, we correlated between-site dissimilarity in photosynthetic activity of vegetation (the enhanced vegetation index) with the corresponding dissimilarity in local species assemblage composition from a global database using a common metric for both, the Bray–Curtis index. We found that dissimilarity in species assemblage composition was on average more influenced by dissimilarity in past than current photosynthetic activity, and that the influence of past dissimilarity increased when longer time periods were considered. Responses to past dissimilarity in photosynthetic activity also differed among taxonomic groups (plants, invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals), with reptiles being among the most influenced by more dissimilar past photosynthetic activity. Furthermore, we found that assemblages dominated by smaller and more vegetation-dependent species tended to be more influenced by dissimilarity in past photosynthetic activity than prey-dependent species. Overall, our results have implications for studies that investigate species responses to current environmental changes and highlight the importance of past changes continuing to influence local speci
Sanchez-Ortiz K, Gonzalez RE, De Palma A, et al., 2019, Land-use and related pressures have reduced biotic integrity more on islands than on mainlands
<jats:title>ABSTRACT</jats:title><jats:p>Tracking progress towards biodiversity targets requires indicators that are sensitive to changes at policy-relevant scales, can easily be aggregated to any spatial scale and are simple to understand. The Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII), which estimates the average abundance of a diverse set of organisms in a given area relative to their reference populations, was proposed in 2005 in response to this need. A new implementation of BII was developed as part of the PREDICTS project in 2016 and has been adopted by GEO BON, IPBES and CBD. The previous global models for BII estimation could not account for pressures having different effects in different settings. Islands are a setting of particular interest: many are home to a disproportionate number of endemic species; oceanic islands may have relatively low overall species diversity because of their isolation; and the pattern and timing of human pressures can be very different from that seen on mainlands. Here, we test whether biotic integrity – as estimated by BII – has decreased more severely on islands than mainlands. We update methods previously used to estimate BII globally (Newbold et al., 2016) to allow pressure effects to differ between islands and mainlands, while also implementing some other recent improvements in modelling. We estimate BII for islands and mainlands by combining global models of how two aspects of biodiversity – overall abundance, and compositional similarity to minimally-impacted sites – have been affected by human pressures. We use these models to project high-resolution (∼1km<jats:sup>2</jats:sup>) global maps of BII for the year 2005. We calculate average BII for island and mainland biomes, countries, IPBES regions and biodiversity hotspots; and repeat our analyses using a richness-based version of BII. BII on both islands and mainlands has fallen below the values proposed as safe limits a
Bayley DT, Mogg AOM, Koldewey H, et al., 2019, Capturing complexity: field-testing the use of 'structure from motion' derived virtual models to replicate standard measures of reef physical structure, PEERJ, Vol: 7, ISSN: 2167-8359
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- Citations: 30
De Palma A, Kuhlmann M, Pearse WD, et al., 2019, Risks to pollinators from different land-use transitions: bee species’ responses to agricultural expansion show strong phylogenetic signal, bioRxiv, Pages: 524546-524546
Newbold T, Hudson LN, Contu S, et al., 2018, Widespread winners and narrow-ranged losers: Land use homogenizes biodiversity in local assemblages worldwide, PLOS BIOLOGY, Vol: 16, ISSN: 1544-9173
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- Citations: 128
Kim H, Rosa IMD, Alkemade R, et al., 2018, A protocol for an intercomparison of biodiversity and ecosystem services models using harmonized land-use and climate scenarios, Geoscientific Model Development, Vol: 11, Pages: 4537-4562, ISSN: 1991-959X
To support the assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the IPBES Expert Group on Scenarios and Models is carrying out an intercomparison of biodiversity and ecosystem services models using harmonized scenarios (BES-SIM). The goals of BES-SIM are (1) to project the global impacts of land-use and climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services (i.e., nature's contributions to people) over the coming decades, compared to the 20th century, using a set of common metrics at multiple scales, and (2) to identify model uncertainties and research gaps through the comparisons of projected biodiversity and ecosystem services across models. BES-SIM uses three scenarios combining specific Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) – SSP1xRCP2.6, SSP3xRCP6.0, SSP5xRCP8.6 – to explore a wide range of land-use change and climate change futures. This paper describes the rationale for scenario selection, the process of harmonizing input data for land use, based on the second phase of the Land Use Harmonization Project (LUH2), and climate, the biodiversity and ecosystem services models used, the core simulations carried out, the harmonization of the model output metrics, and the treatment of uncertainty. The results of this collaborative modeling project will support the ongoing global assessment of IPBES, strengthen ties between IPBES and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios and modeling processes, advise the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) on its development of a post-2020 strategic plans and conservation goals, and inform the development of a new generation of nature-centred scenarios.
Fenton IS, Baranowski U, Boscolo-Galazzo F, et al., 2018, Factors affecting consistency and accuracy in identifying modern macroperforate planktonic foraminifera, Journal of Micropalaeontology, Vol: 37, Pages: 431-443, ISSN: 0262-821X
Planktonic foraminifera are widely used in biostratigraphic, palaeoceanographic and evolutionary studies, but the strength of many study conclusions could be weakened if taxonomic identifications are not reproducible by different workers. In this study, to assess the relative importance of a range of possible reasons for among-worker disagreement in identification, 100 specimens of 26 species of macroperforate planktonic foraminifera were selected from a core-top site in the subtropical Pacific Ocean. Twenty-three scientists at different career stages – including some with only a few days experience of planktonic foraminifera – were asked to identify each specimen to species level, and to indicate their confidence in each identification. The participants were provided with a species list and had access to additional reference materials. We use generalised linear mixed-effects models to test the relevance of three sets of factors in identification accuracy: participant-level characteristics (including experience), species-level characteristics (including a participant's knowledge of the species) and specimen-level characteristics (size, confidence in identification). The 19 less experienced scientists achieve a median accuracy of 57 %, which rises to 75 % for specimens they are confident in. For the 4 most experienced participants, overall accuracy is 79 %, rising to 93 % when they are confident. To obtain maximum comparability and ease of analysis, everyone used a standard microscope with only 35× magnification, and each specimen was studied in isolation. Consequently, these data provide a lower limit for an estimate of consistency. Importantly, participants could largely predict whether their identifications were correct or incorrect: their own assessments of specimen-level confidence and of their previous knowledge of species concepts were the strongest predictors of accuracy.
Mace GM, Barrett M, Burgess ND, et al., 2018, Aiming higher to bend the curve of biodiversity loss, Nature Sustainability, Vol: 1, Pages: 448-451
© 2018, The Publisher. The development of the post-2020 strategic plan for the Convention on Biological Diversity provides a vital window of opportunity to set out an ambitious plan of action to restore global biodiversity. The components of such a plan, including its goal, targets and some metrics, already exist and provide a roadmap to 2050.
Jones KE, Purvis A, 2018, Ben Collen (1978-2018) obituary, NATURE ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION, Vol: 2, Pages: 1199-1200, ISSN: 2397-334X
Phillips HRP, Halley JM, Urbina-Cardona JN, et al., 2018, The effect of fragment area on site-level biodiversity, ECOGRAPHY, Vol: 41, Pages: 1220-1231, ISSN: 0906-7590
Echeverrĩa-Londoño S, Särkinen T, Fenton IS, et al., 2018, Dynamism and context dependency in the diversification of the megadiverse plant genus<i>Solanum</i>L. (Solanaceae)
<jats:title>Summary</jats:title><jats:p><jats:list list-type="bullet"><jats:list-item><jats:p>Explosive radiations have been considered one of the most intriguing diversification patterns across the Tree of Life, but the subsequent change, movement and extinction of the constituent species makes radiations hard to discern or understand as geological time passes.</jats:p></jats:list-item><jats:list-item><jats:p>We synthesised phylogenetic and distributional data for an ongoing radiation — the mega-diverse plant genus<jats:italic>Solanum</jats:italic>L. — to show how dispersal events and past climatic changes have interacted to shape diversification.</jats:p></jats:list-item><jats:list-item><jats:p>We found that despite the vast diversity of<jats:italic>Solanum</jats:italic>lineages in the Neotropics, lineages in the Old World are diversifying more rapidly. This recent explosive diversification coincides with a long-distance dispersal event from the Neotropics, at the time when, and to places where, major climatic changes took place. Two different groups of<jats:italic>Solanum</jats:italic>have migrated and established in Australia, but only the arid-adapted lineages experienced significant increases in their diversification, which is consistent with adaptation to the continent’s long-term climatic trend and the diversification of other arid-adapted groups.</jats:p></jats:list-item><jats:list-item><jats:p>Our findings provide a clear example of how successful colonisation of new areas and niches can – but do not always – drive explosive radiations.</jats:p></jats:list-item></jats:list></jats:p>
Hoskins AJ, Harwood TD, Ware C, et al., 2018, Supporting global biodiversity assessment through high-resolution macroecological modelling: Methodological underpinnings of the BILBI framework
<jats:title>ABSTRACT</jats:title><jats:sec><jats:title>Aim</jats:title><jats:p>Global indicators of change in the state of terrestrial biodiversity are often derived by intersecting observed or projected changes in the distribution of habitat transformation, or of protected areas, with underlying patterns in the distribution of biodiversity. However the two main sources of data used to account for biodiversity patterns in such assessments – i.e. ecoregional boundaries, and vertebrate species ranges – are typically delineated at a much coarser resolution than the spatial grain of key ecological processes shaping both land-use and biological distributions at landscape scale. Species distribution modelling provides one widely used means of refining the resolution of mapped species distributions, but is limited to a subset of species which is biased both taxonomically and geographically, with some regions of the world lacking adequate data to generate reliable models even for better-known biological groups.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Innovation</jats:title><jats:p>Macroecological modelling of collective properties of biodiversity (e.g. alpha and beta diversity) as a correlative function of environmental predictors offers an alternative, yet highly complementary, approach to refining the spatial resolution with which patterns in the distribution of biodiversity can be mapped across our planet. Here we introduce a new capability – BILBI (the Biogeographic Infrastructure for Large-scaled Biodiversity Indicators) – which has implemented this approach by integrating advances in macroecological modelling, biodiversity informatics, remote sensing and high-performance computing to assess spatial-temporal change in biodiversity at ~1km grid resolution across the entire terrestrial surface of the planet. The initial implementation of this infrastructure focuses on modelli
Hill SLL, Gonzalez R, Sanchez-Ortiz K, et al., 2018, Worldwide impacts of past and projected future land-use change on local species richness and the Biodiversity Intactness Index
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Although people have modified the world around us throughout human history, the ‘Great Acceleration’ has seen drivers such as land conversion, exploitation of natural populations, species introductions, pollution and human-induced climate change placing biodiversity under increasing pressure. In this paper we examine 1) how terrestrial species communities have been impacted over the last thousand years of human development and 2) how plausible futures defined by alternative socio-economic scenarios are expected to impact species communities in the future. We use the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) database to model impacts of land-use change and human population on local species richness, community abundance, and biodiversity intactness using a mixed-effects modelling structure. Historical impacts are inferred through projection of model results onto maps of historical land use, provided by the land-use harmonization project, and gridded human population density (HYDE 3.1). Future impacts are explored using the Shared Socio-economic Pathway (SSP) scenarios. These scenarios detail five plausible global futures based upon socio-economic factors such as wealth, population, education, technology, and reliance on fossil fuels, and can be combined with Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios to consider climate mitigation strategies. We project model results onto the gridded outputs of six SSP/RCP scenario combinations: SSP1/RCP2.6, SSP2/RCP4.5, SSP3/RCP7.0, SSP4/RCP3.4, SSP4/RCP6.0, and SSP5/RCP8.5. Historical trend lines show that most losses in local biodiversity are relatively recent, with 75% of all loss in both abundance-based Biodiversity Intactness Index and species richness occurring post-1800. Stark regional differences emerge in all future scenarios, with biodiversity in African regions undergoing greater losses than Oceani
Palma AD, Hoskins A, Gonzalez RE, et al., 2018, Annual changes in the Biodiversity Intactness Index in tropical and subtropical forest biomes, 2001-2012
<jats:title>ABSTRACT</jats:title><jats:p>Few biodiversity indicators are available that reflect the state of broad-sense biodiversity—rather than of particular taxa—at fine spatial and temporal resolution. The Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) estimates how the average abundance of native terrestrial species in a region compares with their abundances before pronounced human impacts. BII is designed for use with data from a wide range of taxa and functional groups and for estimation at any resolution for which data on land use and related pressures are available. For each year from 2001 to 2012, we combined models of how land use and related pressures in tropical and subtropical forested biomes affect overall abundance and compositional similarity of plants, fungi, invertebrates and vertebrates, with data on anthropogenic pressures to produce annual maps of modelled BII at a spatial resolution of 30 arc seconds (roughly 1 km at the equator) across tropical and subtropical forested biomes. This is the first time temporal change in BII has been estimated across such a large region. The approach we have used to model compositional similarity uses data more efficiently than that used previously when estimating BII. Across tropical and subtropical biomes, BII fell by an average of 1.9 percentage points between 2001 and 2012, with 81 countries seeing an average reduction and 43 an average increase; the extent of primary forest fell by 3.9% over the same period. Changes are not strongly related to countries’ rates of economic growth over the same period.</jats:p>
Kim H, Rosa IMD, Alkemade R, et al., 2018, A protocol for an intercomparison of biodiversity and ecosystem services models using harmonized land-use and climate scenarios
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>To support the assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the IPBES Expert Group on Scenarios and Models is carrying out an intercomparison of biodiversity and ecosystem services models using harmonized scenarios (BES-SIM). The goals of BES-SIM are (1) to project the global impacts of land use and climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services (i.e. nature’s contributions to people) over the coming decades, compared to the 20<jats:sup>th</jats:sup> century, using a set of common metrics at multiple scales, and (2) to identify model uncertainties and research gaps through the comparisons of projected biodiversity and ecosystem services across models. BES-SIM uses three scenarios combining specific Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) to explore a wide range of land-use change and climate change futures. This paper describes the rationale for scenarios selection, the process of harmonizing input data for land use, based on the second phase of the Land Use Harmonization Project (LUH2), and climate, the biodiversity and ecosystem service models used, the core simulations carried out, the harmonization of the model output metrics, and the treatment of uncertainty. The results of this collaborative modelling project will support the ongoing global assessment of IPBES, strengthen ties between IPBES and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios and modelling processes, advise the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) on its development of a post-2020 strategic plans and conservation goals, and inform the development of a new generation of nature-centred scenarios.</jats:p>
Purvis A, Newbold T, De Palma A, et al., 2018, Modelling and Projecting the Response of Local Terrestrial Biodiversity Worldwide to Land Use and Related Pressures: The PREDICTS Project, NEXT GENERATION BIOMONITORING, PT 1, Vol: 58, Pages: 201-241, ISSN: 0065-2504
De Palma A, Sanchez-Ortiz K, Martin PA, et al., 2018, Challenges With Inferring How Land-Use Affects Terrestrial Biodiversity: Study Design, Time, Space and Synthesis, NEXT GENERATION BIOMONITORING, PT 1, Editors: Bohan, Dumbrell, Woodward, Jackson, Publisher: ELSEVIER ACADEMIC PRESS INC, Pages: 163-199
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- Citations: 62
Ezard THG, Purvis A, 2017, Environmental changes define ecological limits to species richness and reveal the mode of macroevolutionary competition (vol 19, pg 899, 2016), ECOLOGY LETTERS, Vol: 20, Pages: 1491-1491, ISSN: 1461-023X
Phillips HRP, Knapp S, Purvis A, 2017, Estimating the potential biodiversity impact of redeveloping small urban spaces: the Natural History Museum's grounds, PEERJ, Vol: 5, ISSN: 2167-8359
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- Citations: 1
Rosa IMD, Pereira HM, Ferrier S, et al., 2017, Multiscale scenarios for nature futures, NATURE ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION, Vol: 1, Pages: 1416-1419, ISSN: 2397-334X
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