Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LUCCA (Land Use and Climate Change Attribution for biodiversity impact assessments)
Reporting period: 2018-09-01 to 2020-08-31
The overall aim of MSCA-IF project LUCCA was to develop a framework for assessing the combined effects of land use and climate change on biodiversity. More specifically, the project had four objectives:
1) Synthesize the literature on land use change impacts on biodiversity, providing recommendations for future research
2) Assess the degree to which land use change may influence biodiversity change patterns attributed to climate change
3) Assess the effects of climate and land use change on species’ populations and distributions over time
4) Test the potential for high-resolution remote sensing imagery and citizen science based habitat descriptions for land use-biodiversity research
LUCCA has also contributed to a systematic review of the role of land use and land cover changes (LULCC) on climate change impacts on biodiversity. Here, the main results are that, within the still very limited literature addressing land use and climate change simultaneously, the majority of studies (62%) found equal importance of the two drivers. Of the remaining studies, half showed larger effects of climate change than LULCC, and the other half showed the opposite trend. The implication is that vulnerability assessments need to account for both drivers to better identify which aspects to focus on in on-the-ground management interventions.
In LUCCA, we have also performed analyses of the potential for remote sensing data products to improve measures of land use change and predictions of bird diversity changes across space and time. These analyses were based on fieldwork, available LiDAR data, and citizen science data provided by Birdlife Denmark and will be disseminated in forthcoming publications.
Finally, at larger spatial scales, LUCCA has contributed to 1) showing the importance of mountains globally to maintain biodiversity in the face of climate and land use changes, 2) showing that mitigating climate change and changing land use towards protecting 30% of land in the tropics could lead to a halving of the extinction risk of tropical species, 3) identifying areas of global importance for simultaneously conserving biodiversity, climate, and water resources, and 4) showcasing the need for accounting for non-equilibrium processes in studies of biodiversity change.
The main results so far as well as contributions derived from LUCCA have been published in the peer reviewed scientific literature, in the journals Global Change Biology (as an invited review), Landscape Ecology, Ecography, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Science, and Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. Further, results from the work performed during LUCCA were presented at several international conferences, including four keynote presentations. Finally, outreach activities included a number of public talks in Denmark and abroad, media interviews, and a presentation at the MSCA Green Deal 2020 event for researchers and policy makers.
The results derived from LUCCA have also direct applications in nature conservation and policymaking. By improving our understanding of land use and climate change impacts (separate and jointly), on-the-ground management decisions will be easier to direct towards the main driver of change for a given region. Results from our analyses of remote sensing imagery are expected to have a positive impact on the development of more effective monitoring of habitat and biodiversity change across large extents. At the international policy scale, the contributions of LUCCA to mapping priority areas and providing evidence on the effects of protecting 30% of lands for extinction risk reductions is of high relevance to the EU 2030 Biodiversity Strategy and UN Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework. Our work stresses the importance of actually implementing these goals for mitigating the biodiversity and climate change crises.