Shifting agriculture is the dominant driver of forest disturbance in threatened forest species’ ranges
Date
2022-05-12
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Springer Nature
Abstract
Forest disturbance, including deforestation, is a major driver of global biodiversity decline. Identifying the underlying socioeconomic drivers can help guide interventions to halt biodiversity decline. Here, we quantified spatial overlaps between the distributions of 6164 globally threatened terrestrial vertebrate species and five major forest disturbance drivers at the global scale: commodity-driven deforestation, shifting agriculture, forestry, wildfire, and urbanization. We find that each driver has a distinct relative importance among species groups and geographic regions with, for example, the dominant disturbance drivers being forestry in northern regions and shifting agriculture in the tropics. Overall, shifting agriculture was more prevalent within threatened forest species’ ranges in the tropics, and some temperate nations. Our findings suggest that, globally, threatened forest species are exposed to a disproportional decrease in habitat area. Combining forest disturbance maps and species ranges can help evaluate agricultural landscape management and prioritize conservation efforts to reduce further biodiversity loss.
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© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Version of Scholarly Record of this Article is published in Communications Earth & Environment, 2022, available online at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00434-5 . Keywords: environmental impact; forest ecology; macroecology.
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Citation
Kadoya, T., Takeuchi, Y., Shinoda, Y. et al. Shifting agriculture is the dominant driver of forest disturbance in threatened forest species’ ranges. Commun Earth Environ 3, 108 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00434-5