Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 285, Issue 1881, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2018.0792
Keywords
biodiversity; climate change; future; global; land-use change; scenarios
Categories
Funding
- Royal Society University Research Fellowship
- UK Natural Environment Research Council [NE/J011193/2]
- NERC [NE/J011193/2] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Land-use and climate change are among the greatest threats facing bio-diversity, but understanding their combined effects has been hampered by modelling and data limitations, resulting in part from the very different scales at which land-use and climate processes operate. I combine two different modelling paradigmsto predict the separate and combined (additive) effects of climate and land-use change on terrestrial vertebrate communities under four different scenarios. I predict that climate-change effects are likely to become a major pressure on biodiversity in the coming decades, probably matching or exceeding the effects of land-use change by 2070. The combined effects of both pressures are predicted to lead to an average cumulative loss of 37.9% of species from vertebrate communities under 'business as usual' (uncertainty ranging from 15.7% to 54.2%). Areas that are predicted to experience the effects of both pressures are concentrated in tropical grasslands and savannahs. The results have important implications for the conservation of biodiversity in future, and for the ability of biodiversity to support important ecosystem functions, upon which humans rely.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available