Journal
SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT
Volume 801, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.149737
Keywords
Life cycle assessment (LCA); Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA); Land-use; Fragmentation; Species-area relationship (SAR); Terrestrial biodiversity
Categories
Funding
- NTNU Sustainability
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This study develops a new set of land-use characterisation factors using the species-habitat relationship method to evaluate the impacts of land use on species richness more comprehensively. Results indicate that ignoring habitat fragmentation effects may lead to systematic underestimation of land-use impacts. The large variation in land-use impacts across different regions emphasizes the importance of regional assessments.
Human land use is one of the primary threats to terrestrial species richness and is considered a priority for meeting global sustainability and biodiversity targets. Decision-support tools, such as life cycle assessment (LCA), are widely used for developing strategies to achieve such objectives. Currently available life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods apply the countryside species-area relationship (c-SAR) to quantify habitat conversion impacts on species richness. However, additional effects of habitat fragmentation are yet ignored in these assessments. We use the species-habitat relationship (SHR), an adaptation of the c-SAR that considers both habitat conversion and fragmentation effects, to develop a new set of land-use characterisation factors for 702 terrestrial ecoregions (in 238 countries), four land-use types (urban, cropland, pasture, and forestry), and four taxonomic groups (amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles; plus the aggregate of these vertebrate groups). The SHR generally predicts higher per-area impacts of land-use than the impacts estimated by the c-SAR (a median relative difference of +9%), indicating that land-use impacts may be systematically underestimated when ignoring fragmentation effects. Whereas per-area impacts of land-use on regional species richness are highest in temperate regions, reflecting the diminished extent of natural habitat, per-area impacts of land-use on global species richness are highest in the subtropics, reflecting the importance of tropical regions and islands to global vertebrate species diversity. The large variety in magnitude of land-use impacts across the world's regions emphasizes the importance of regionalised assessments. The set of characterisation factors proposed here can be readily used in environmental decision-making. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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