Changes in human footprint drive changes in species extinction risk

Predicting how species respond to human pressure is essential to anticipate their decline and identify appropriate conservation strategies. Both human pressure and extinction risk change over time, but their inter-relationship is rarely considered in extinction risk modelling. Here we measure the relationship between the change in terrestrial human footprint (HFP)—representing cumulative human pressure on the environment—and the change in extinction risk of the world’s terrestrial mammals. We find the values of HFP across space, and its change over time, are significantly correlated to trends in species extinction risk, with higher predictive importance than environmental or life-history variables. The anthropogenic conversion of areas with low pressure values (HFP < 3 out of 50) is the most significant predictor of change in extinction risk, but there are biogeographical variations. Our framework, calibrated on past extinction risk trends, can be used to predict the impact of increasing human pressure on biodiversity. Species extinction risk is difficult to measure and often lags behind the pace of increasing threats. Here, the authors demonstrate how monitoring changes in cumulative human pressures could be used to rapidly assess potential change in species’ conservation status.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Nature Communications

• Publication date

  2018-11-05

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/s41467-018-07049-5PMID 30397204PMCID 6218474
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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