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Indices for terrestrial ecosystems of Colombia grouped by biogeographic region. (a) The Red List Index of Ecosystems (RLIE) for the overall risk and for each symptom of decline, and (b) the Ecosystem Area Index and Ecosystem Health Index for historic (since 1750), recent (past 50 years), and predicted future (next 50 years) timeframes. Intervals were calculated using the 2.5th and 97.5th percentiles to represent the middle 95% of the data. See Tables S3 and S4 for values
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Governments have committed to global targets to slow biodiversity loss and sustain ecosystem services. Biodiversity state indicators that measure progress toward these targets mostly focus on species, while indicators synthesizing ecosystem change are largely lacking. We fill this gap with three indices quantifying past and projected changes in eco...
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Citations
... Many approaches developed to assess ecological functionality consider changes in primary productivity (Hill et al. 2022), carbon stock (Sims et al. 2019), or other biophysical aspects of ecosystem functioning. Alternative approaches correlate the magnitude of degradation to the risk of ecological collapse (Rowland et al. 2020). Method-ologies developed under this realm are less oriented toward the intactness side of the integrity spectrum and more focused on the maintenance of ecosystem functionality and the reduction of ecosystem collapse risk. ...
With the Kunming‐Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), the international community has committed to retaining ecosystems of high ecological integrity. Monitoring progress toward this target requires the identification of suitable indicators, but these are not universally recognized. In this study, we analyze available global maps of terrestrial ecological integrity and evaluate their representation of different dimensions of integrity (structure, composition, and function). Although 73% of terrestrial surface holds conservation value according to at least one map, less than 1% of land attains high integrity according to all of them. Solely relying on one indicator map risks overlooking the integrity value of at least 41 million km² of land, with some key areas for biodiversity conservation inadequately represented by these indicators of integrity. However, when used in combination, complementary dimensions of integrity help identify an area covering 41.1% of the terrestrial surface, two‐thirds requiring urgent conservation action. The synergistic use of existing measures offers considerable potential to guide the implementation of Target 1 of the GBF while supporting more equitable conservation paradigms. Developing robust indicators and understanding the link among different ecological dimensions is essential to protect ecosystems of high ecological integrity in the long term.
... Companies may also make use of existing frameworks for evaluating ecosystem status, such as the Red List of Ecosystems [34,35]. While Red List of Ecosystem assessments are generally produced by governments or NGOs, companies could build on and update such assessments for the ecosystems they operate within, using Red List Indices to track ecosystem extent and integrity over time [36]. Similarly, the scale of considering metrics across a supply shed may benefit from using metrics under development by SBTN and TNFD which seek to communicate corporate and portfolio-scale risk. ...
Nature Positive is a concept and approach that focuses on restoring and enhancing nature to improve biodiversity, ecosystem health, and nature’s benefits to humanity. While the Nature Positive movement is gaining significant momentum, with 90 countries currently signed on, achieving its ambitious vision will require engagement and contributions from all sectors of society. Notably, both governments and the private sector will need to align and embrace transformative change. A comprehensive understanding and implementation of the mitigation hierarchy as a foundation is a first step. This will require commitment, regulation, incentives and actions to both halt the drivers of biodiversity loss and support appropriate biodiversity restoration and protection along supply chains. While there is guidance on reporting, disclosure and target setting through frameworks such as Science-Based Targets Network (SBTN) and the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), there is a need for a clear pathway for companies, investors and policy makers for achieving Nature Positive. In this paper, we review and describe how the Nature Positive concept intersects with global and national-scale policy instruments and identify a set of key principles which can support companies on a Nature Positive pathway. Focusing initially on corporate action we explore how the mining sector can test the model for transforming company operations to achieve nature positive outcomes. We chose mining given its importance to the global economy, its impact on land, and its burgeoning role in the energy transition to a low carbon economy through the provision of critical minerals. The value of the contribution to this transition will be undermined if mining activities exacerbate the loss of biodiversity. We illustrate a conceptual approach that can guide the mining sector, including some key metrics that can be used to track and communicate progress toward nature positive goals. The mining sector has been testing and implementing a range of approaches such as No Net Loss, Net Positive Impact, biodiversity offsets, and lender standards over the last two decades. This provides an excellent foundation upon which to build nature positive ambition and outcomes. Ultimately, the guidance for Nature Positive can be adapted and replicated across other sectors and provide policy makers with the appropriate proof-points that can align on regulation so that robust business practices can drive Nature Positive outcomes with benefits for both people and nature.
... This region extends from 11°N n the northernmost tip of South America to 23°S in northern Argentina, and is characterized by varied mosaics shaped by the spatial and environmental heterogeneity promoted by its stunning topography (Herzog et al. 2012;Tovar et al. 2022). The ecosystems that it harbors provide essential services such as soil protection, carbon storage, and water supply for millions of people (Buytaert et al. 2011;Peters et al. 2019;Rowland et al. 2019), supporting the livelihoods of over 50 million individuals (Cincotta et al. 2000). However, despite their significance, the region's mountain ecosystems still need to be studied. ...
The tropical Andes region harbors areas that are highly significant for biodiversity at both global and local scales. However, despite the severe conservation threats that this region has to confront, conservation initiatives are limited, by funding and because of the need for more information to decide which areas are priorities for conservation. Identifying Important Plant Areas (IPAs) offers a valuable methodology for establishing conservation priorities, a particularly complex task in a mega-biodiverse region such as the northern Andean tropics. Due to its iconic recognition and conservation value, this study focused on the Espeletiinae subtribe (Asteraceae) as a model group; hence, the distribution data for 138 species was compiled from 5560 georeferenced records. Using the IPA methodology, we divided the study area, this is, the distribution area of the subtribe in the Andean tropics, into 220 Units of Analysis (UA) represented by 10 × 10 km plots. Refined species’ distribution areas, incorporating richness, threatened species, and ecosystem-based richness distributions, were analyzed using newly generated maps to evaluate the conservation value of each UA. Our analysis identified 176 UAs with some level of relevance using sub-criterion cA1 (with 59 species) and 51 UAs using sub-criterion cB (with 76 species). Integrating both criteria, we classified 11 UAs as high-priority, 62 as medium-priority, and 147 as low-priority, highlighting the IPAs that require focused conservation efforts. Two identified high-priority IPAs are located in Venezuela and nine in Colombia, predominantly associated with the Eastern Cordillera. These areas concentrate between 7 and 12 species. They are mainly linked to the páramo complexes of Colombia and the Sierra Nevada in Venezuela, primarily within Cool Temperate Moist Grassland ecosystems on mountains. Our results provide a spatial planning procedure and analytical tool for decision-makers to guide conservation management and actions across northern Andes.
... The significance of RLE is recognised in the recently approved Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), 2023, for its incorporation in law and government regulatory tools, the listing of the threatened ecosystems to improve their status in legal protection, acts as an important tool in planning and expansion of protected areas, for informing decisions regarding the restoration investments (Rowland et al. 2020a;IUCN-CEM 2021). The Red List of Ecosystems uses the IUCN Red List Index for Ecosystems as the reporting index, which is one of the main indicators in the monitoring framework for the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. ...
With the recently adopted Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), the significance of ecosystem health and the need for increasing the protected area/other effective area-based conservation measures (OECM) coverage has been reiterated. Ecosystem health assessment or Red Listing of Ecosystems is the headline indicator for target A of GBF. The indicators listed in the IUCN Red Listing of Ecosystems (RLE) have been adopted to monitor the important targets under the Global Biodiversity Framework. Globally, 4279 ecosystems have been assessed using IUCN RLE, and immense potential exists to study the indicators to monitor and classify the health of Indian ecosystems, especially high conservation-value ecosystems. The work presented here synthesises the analyses of the pertinent current global trends in this domain to plan a suitable decentralised approach for assessing ecosystems in India that will be required to be included in the upcoming National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAPs) as per GBF.
... At the global scale, Myers et al. (2000) identified 25 "hotspots," biogeographic regions where high levels of plant diversity and human threats coincide. Additionally, Baillie et al. (2008) and Rowland et al. (2020) proposed indices towards monitoring global biodiversity. ...
The scientific community faces the challenge of measuring progress toward biodiversity targets and indices have been traditionally used. However, recent inventories in secondary tropical mountain forests using traditional biodiversity indices have yielded results that are indistinct with primary ones. This shows the need to develop complementary indices that goes beyond species count but integrates the distribution and conservation status of the species. This study developed endemicity and conservation importance index for tropical forest that incorporated the distribution and conservation status of the species. These indices were applied to Mt. Natoo, a remnant primary mossy forest in Buguias, Benguet, Philippines, that resulted to endemicity index of 81.07 and conservation importance index of 42.90. Comparing these with secondary forest sites with comparable Shannon-Wiener, Simpson, Evenness and Margalef’s indices, our endemicity and conservation indices clearly differentiates primary forest (our study site) with higher values from secondary forests with much lower values. Thus, we are proposing these indices for a direct but scientifically-informed identification of specific sites for conservation and protection in tropical forests. Additionally, our study documented a total of 168 vascular plant species (79 endemic and 12 locally threatened species) in Mt. Nato-o. Majority are of tropical elements for both generic and species levels with some temperate elements that could be attributed to the site’s high elevation and semi-temperate climate. These are important baseline information for conservation plans and monitoring of tropical mossy forests.
... The concept of collapse has a theoretical and an operational interpretation that need to be clarified before assessing the ecosystem threat status. Theoretically, the concept of ecosystem collapse is similar to that of species extinction and implies the relatively sudden, complete, and long-lasting alteration of the structure, composition, and functioning of ecosystems (Cumming & Peterson, 2017;Keith et al., 2013;Rowland et al., 2019), for example, as caused by climate change (Boitani et al., 2015;Mahoney & Bishop, 2017). Operationally, to estimate the risk of ecosystem collapse, the RLE protocol relies on a series of thresholds that the ecosystems could exceed to reach a threat category; thus, the availability of historical data to determine such thresholds is essential (Keith et al., 2013). ...
Climate change is one of the most important drivers of ecosystem change, the global‐scale impacts of which will intensify over the next 2 decades. Estimating the timing of unprecedented changes is not only challenging but is of great importance for the development of ecosystem conservation guidelines. Time of emergence (ToE) (point at which climate change can be differentiated from a previous climate), a widely applied concept in climatology studies, provides a robust but unexplored approach for assessing the risk of ecosystem collapse, as described by the C criterion of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Ecosystems (RLE). We identified 3 main theoretical considerations of ToE for RLE assessment (degree of stability, multifactorial instead of one‐dimensional analyses, and hallmarks of ecosystem collapse) and 4 sources of uncertainty when applying ToE methodology (intermodel spread, historical reference period, consensus among variables, and consideration of different scenarios), which aims to avoid misuse and errors while promoting a proper application of the framework by scientists and practitioners. The incorporation of ToE for the RLE assessments adds important information for conservation priority setting that allows prediction of changes within and beyond the time frames proposed by the RLE.
... Knowing the departing base level, requires knowledge of the distribution of species, abundances and habitats among other factors (Borja et al., 2011;Miloslavich et al., 2018). For this reason, during last years, a great effort has been made to create tools in order to obtain information and adequately monitor marine biodiversity (Andersen et al., 2014;Borja et al., 2011;Halpern et al., 2012;Nicholson et al., 2021;Rodríguez et al., 2015;Rowland et al., 2020). Thanks to this intense and continuous work, it is becoming possible to integrate the available scientific information that serves as a source of data to study and predict the changes that are occurring in the marine environment (Borja et al., 2019). ...
Knowledge of marine biodiversity is vital for developing appropriate conservation policies. In the current Information Age, data shared by citizens in social networks are a cost-effective alternative to complement on-going marine biodiversity monitoring programs, as well as to understand human interactions with the natural environment from a current perspective. This information can be obtained in a transparent way to the citizen (passive citizen science approach) after sharing relevant content such as: rare catches of recreational fishermen, sightings of invasive species, stranding of cetaceans, sea turtle entanglements, episodes of massive arrival of jellyfish or interactions between organisms, among others. This study has analyzed the content posted on the social networking site X (formerly known as Twitter) from its launch in 2007 to 2022, focusing on those posts that apparently reported a biodiversity observation along the Spanish coast. To avoid an initial bias, generic messages asking “who knows” or if “anyone knows” what they have found were captured, as well as messages stating that they had found something interesting. After retrieving ∼11 K tweets with potential information, 597 tweets were finally identified after human validation. Most of the observations (21%) corresponded to gelatinous animals, with observations of fish (11%) and marine mammals (11%) also being frequent. 57% of these tweets were adequately located over the coast, drawing the first coastal biodiversity map in Spain based on this methodology. The results show this technique as a low-cost tool complementary to existing monitoring programs, which allows studying the occurrence as well as the temporal variability of non-indigenous and sensitive species, as well as to alert in case of massive coastal arrivals of jellyfish, or stranding of cetaceans or sea turtles, among others.
... The first map was produced by Kennedy et al. 2019 (77) Estimate protected area coverage and human pressure within relatively less known tidal flat ecosystems (79) To map ecological connectivity at continental scales (80) Forecast species range contractions (81) The first map was produced by Sanderson et al. 2002 (66) Global species and environmental assessments (e.g., 72,100,132) Categorizations of Earth (e.g., 69,114,115) Development of global intactness metrics (e.g., 4, 116, 119) ...
... Mapping how degraded an ecosystem is due to industrial activity (and its relative "integrity") is inherently complex and can be value-laden (113), as it involves comparisons of measures of ecosystem structure, composition, and function against a baseline or reference state (109). There have been increasing calls for approaches to measure and interpret gradients of integrity consistently across ecosystem types and jurisdictional boundaries utilizing methods that are repeatable and simple to interpret (109,114). Recent advances in human industrial influence mapping have enabled different methodologies to capture important elements of ecosystem integrity, many of which have been shown to be helpful in guiding ecosystem assessment and decision making (109,115,116). For example, across the global humid tropics, forests have recently been mapped using a combination of space-based lidar, multispectral imagery, and human pressure indices to delineate gradients of forest structural integrity (117,118). ...
As anthropogenic transformation of Earth's ecology accelerates, and its impacts on the sustainability of humanity and the rest of nature become more obvious, geographers and other researchers are leveraging an abundance of spatial data to map how industrialization is transforming the biosphere. This review examines the methodologies used to create such maps and how they have enhanced our understanding of how societies can abate biodiversity loss, mitigate climate change, and achieve global sustainability goals. Although there have been great advances over the past two decades in mapping industrial transformations of ecology across the planet, the field is still in its infancy. We outline future research directions to better understand anthropogenic transformation of the biosphere and the utility of integrating global maps of socioeconomic, ecological, biodiversity, and climate data to explore and inform potential pathways of human-driven social-ecological change.
... Few papers have been addressed in this approach. The related areas in this session are mapping climate change vulnerability under agricultural ecosystems (Gebrehiwot and van der Veen, 2013); highlighting an ES provision by mangrove ecosystems (Afonso et al., 2021); Identifying the restoration indicators in mining landscapes (Gwenzi, 2021); and assessing ecosystem changes in terrestrial, forest and agricultural ecosystems (Schneibel et al., 2016;Rowland et al., 2020). ...
Assessment of ecosystem services (ES) is vital for environmental sustainability and human wellbeing. A number of approaches are used to map the ES of a range of the types of ecosystems in various scope scales around the world. With a view of facilitating the scientific background to address the relevant methods of ES assessment, this review aims to highlight the characteristics of the studies carried out in Africa and make an idea on the recent approaches used for ES mapping. In total, 503 abstracts were reviewed to identify the relevant publications from which 48 publications were used for the review. Model-based mapping, Proxy indicators-based mapping, Remote sensing (RS) and GIS-based mapping and Expert-based mapping approaches have been found to be applied to map ES in Africa. The approach of RS and GIS basis technics was generally predominated (56.25%) where studies on wetlands and mangrove ecosystems (44.44%) and at the local scale (70.37%) were mostly documented. The domain of ES dynamics (52.94%), ES supply (41.18%) and environmental change (34.29%) were largely addressed. Excluding articles because of 10-year publications could reduce some information related to the purpose of the review. However, the evidence provided in this document represents a significant step forward in ES mapping and conservation efforts to improve the sustainability of ES in Africa.
... Few papers have been addressed in this approach. The related areas in this session are mapping climate change vulnerability under agricultural ecosystems (Gebrehiwot and van der Veen, 2013); highlighting an ES provision by mangrove ecosystems (Afonso et al., 2021); Identifying the restoration indicators in mining landscapes (Gwenzi, 2021); and assessing ecosystem changes in terrestrial, forest and agricultural ecosystems (Schneibel et al., 2016;Rowland et al., 2020). ...
Assessment of ecosystem services (ES) is vital for environmental sustainability and human wellbeing. A number of approaches are used to map the ES of a range of the types of ecosystems in various scope scales around the world. With a view of facilitating the scientific background to address the relevant methods of ES assessment, this review aims to highlight the characteristics of the studies carried out in Africa and make an idea on the recent approaches used for ES mapping. In total, 503 abstracts were reviewed to identify the relevant publications from which 48 publications were used for the review. Model-based mapping, Proxy indicators-based mapping, Remote sensing (RS) and GIS-based mapping and Expert-based mapping approaches have been found to be applied to map ES in Africa. The approach of RS and GIS basis technics was generally predominated (56.25%) where studies on wetlands and mangrove ecosystems (44.44%) and at the local scale (70.37%) were mostly documented. The domain of ES dynamics (52.94%), ES supply (41.18%) and environmental change (34.29%) were largely addressed. Excluding articles because of 10-year publications could reduce some information related to the purpose of the review. However, the evidence provided in this document represents a significant step forward in ES mapping and conservation efforts to improve the sustainability of ES in Africa.
