Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LUCCA (Land Use and Climate Change Attribution for biodiversity impact assessments)
Berichtszeitraum: 2018-09-01 bis 2020-08-31
Anthropogenic environmental change poses severe threats to biodiversity across the globe. Much research has focused on impacts of climate change on natural ecosystems, but we know little about combined effects with land use changes. Halting biodiversity loss and mitigating the impacts of climate change are among the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the EU’s 2020 Biodiversity Strategy. To achieve those goals, there is an urgent need for understanding how species have responded to global environmental change, and for improving predictions of impacts under future scenarios.
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
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
During project LUCCA, we reviewed the past literature dealing with the land use and biodiversity literature. This work included the manual review of 100 papers and the application of text-mining tools to analyze over 4,000 published abstracts. We unveiled strong taxonomic and spatial biases in the literature, particularly towards temperate forest regions. These biases mean we are basing our knowledge on land use change impacts on biodiversity on a skewed basis that only represents part of the world’s biodiversity, biomes, land use history, and climates. A better representation of e.g. tropical, and more arid regions, as well as more taxonomic groups will be key for better predicting the combined effects of climate and land use change on biodiversity and ecosystem feedbacks into the future.
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.
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.
LUCCA has so far provided for the first time an overview of the biases in existing work related to land use change impacts on biodiversity. We have provided recommendations for future scientific research to close our knowledge gaps, and increased the evidence that we need to simultaneously account for land use and climate change in research for better understanding observed and future changes in biodiversity. Our hope is that this work will have an impact on future research, helping direct more work towards a better coverage of understudied regions and taxa, improving the methodologies used for quantifying land use change and its impacts, and integrating land use and climate change in vulnerability assessments.
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.
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.