Tim Newbold

University College London | UCL · Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment (GEE)

Animal‐mediated pollination is a key ecosystem service required to some extent by almost three‐quarters of the leading human food crops in global food production. Anthropogenic pressures such as habitat loss and land‐use intensification are causing shifts in ecological community composition, potentially resulting in declines in pollination services...

Protected areas are typically considered a cornerstone of conservation programs and play a fundamental role in protecting natural areas and biodiversity. Human‐driven land‐use and land‐cover (LULC) changes lead to habitat loss and biodiversity loss inside protected areas, impairing their effectiveness. However, the global dynamics of habitat qualit...

Understanding the extent to which people and wildlife overlap in space and time is critical for the conservation of biodiversity and ecological services. Yet, how global change will reshape the future of human-wildlife overlap has not been assessed. We show that the potential spatial overlap of global human populations and 22,374 terrestrial verteb...

The global food system is a key driver of land-use and climate change which in turn drive biodiversity change. Developing sustainable food systems is therefore critical to reversing biodiversity loss. We use the multi-regional input-output model EXIOBASE to estimate the biodiversity impacts embedded within the global food system in 2011. Using mode...

The body of ecological literature, which informs much of our knowledge of the global loss of biodiversity, has been experiencing rapid growth in recent decades. The increasing difficulty of synthesising this literature manually has simultaneously resulted in a growing demand for automated text mining methods. Within the domain of deep learning, lar...

To reduce the biodiversity impact of agriculture, increasing yields on existing farmland has been proposed as an alternative to farmland expansion. However, the relative effects of yield increases versus agricultural expansion have mostly been examined regionally, and measured in terms of species persistence—a metric relevant to extinction risk but...

As global average surface temperature increases, extreme climatic events such as heatwaves are becoming more frequent and intense, which can drive biodiversity responses such as rapid population declines and/or shifts in species distributions and even local extirpations. However, the impacts of extreme climatic events are largely ignored in conserv...

Land‐use and climate change are major pressures on terrestrial biodiversity. Species’ extinction risk and responses to human pressures relate to ecological traits and other characteristics in some clades. However, large‐scale comparative assessments of the associations between traits and responses to multiple human pressures across multiple clades...

The body of ecological literature, which informs much of our knowledge of the global loss of biodiversity, has been experiencing rapid growth in recent decades. The increasing difficulty to synthesise this literature manually has simultaneously resulted in a growing demand for automated text mining methods. Within the domain of deep learning, large...

Insect pollinator biodiversity is changing rapidly, with potential consequences for the provision of crop pollination. However, the role of land use–climate interactions in pollinator biodiversity changes, as well as consequent economic effects via changes in crop pollination, remains poorly understood. We present a global assessment of the interac...

Sub-Saharan Africa is facing an expected doubling of human population and tripling of food demand over the next quarter century, posing a range of severe environmental, political, and socio-economic challenges. In some cases, key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are in direct conflict, raising difficult policy and funding decisions, particularl...

Insect biodiversity is changing rapidly, driven by a complex suite of pressures, foremost among which are human land use, land-use intensification, and increasingly climate change. Bumblebees deliver important pollination services to wild plants and human crops, but we lack large-scale empirical evidence on how land use and climate change interact...

Land-use change is currently the greatest driver of biodiversity change, with climate change predicted to match or surpass its impacts by mid-century. The global food system is a key driver of both these anthropogenic pressures, thus the development of sustainable food systems will be critical to halting and reversing biodiversity loss. Previous st...

Background Land-use is a major driver of changes in biodiversity worldwide, but studies have overwhelmingly focused on above-ground taxa: the effects on soil biodiversity are less well known, despite the importance of soil organisms in ecosystem functioning. We modelled data from a global biodiversity database to compare how the abundance of soil-d...

A bstract The total number of species on earth and the rate at which new species are created are fundamental questions for ecology, evolution and conservation. These questions have typically been approached separately, despite their obvious interconnection. In this manuscript we approach both questions in conjunction, for all terrestrial animals, w...

Human-induced environmental changes have a direct impact on species populations, with some species experiencing declines while others display population growth. Understanding why and how species populations respond differently to environmental changes is fundamental to mitigate and predict future biodiversity changes. Theoretically, species life-hi...

Purpose The multiple climate tipping points potential (MCTP) is a novel metric in life-cycle assessment (LCA). It addresses the contribution of greenhouse gas emissions to disturb those processes in the Earth system, which could pass a tipping point and thereby trigger large, abrupt and potentially irreversible changes. The MCTP, however, does not...

Despite substantial progress in understanding global biodiversity loss, major taxonomic and geographic knowledge gaps remain. Decision makers often rely on expert judgement to fill knowledge gaps, but are rarely able to engage with sufficiently large and diverse groups of specialists. To improve understanding of the perspectives of thousands of bio...

Aim Agriculture is one of the greatest pressures on biodiversity. Regional studies have shown that the presence of natural habitat and landscape heterogeneity are beneficial for biodiversity in agriculture, but it remains unclear whether their importance varies geographically. Here, we use local biodiversity data to determine which local and landsc...

As agricultural land use and climate change continue to pose increasing threats to biodiversity in sub‐Saharan Africa, efforts are being made to identify areas where trade‐offs between future agricultural development and terrestrial biodiversity conservation are expected to be greatest. However, little research so far has focused on freshwater biod...

Several previous studies have investigated changes in insect biodiversity, with some highlighting declines and others showing turnover in species composition without net declines1–5. Although research has shown that biodiversity changes are driven primarily by land-use change and increasingly by climate change6,7, the potential for interaction betw...

Scenario analysis is a powerful tool that allows policymakers to explore plausible futures in a systematic manner. This technical briefing describes the process to translate the ‘storylines’ that emerged from a stakeholder workshop in Zambia in 2018, into maps of projected land cover change to 2050.

Anthropogenic pressure has well‐documented effects on the spatial distribution of biodiversity but it can also have more subtle effects on wildlife, influencing the time of the day and for how long animals are active. These temporal effects have not received much attention from the scientific and conservation community, despite activity being intri...

Rapid human-driven environmental changes are impacting animal populations around the world. Currently, land-use and climate change are two of the biggest pressures facing biodiversity. However, studies investigating the impacts of these pressures on population trends often do not consider potential interactions between climate and land-use change....

Land-use change is the leading driver of global biodiversity loss thus characterising its impacts on the functional structure of ecological communities is an urgent challenge. Using a database describing vertebrate assemblages in different land uses, we assess how the type and intensity of land use affect the functional diversity of vertebrates glo...

Feedbacks are an essential feature of resilient socio-economic systems, yet the feedbacks between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human wellbeing are not fully accounted for in global policy efforts that consider future scenarios for human activities and their consequences for nature. Failure to integrate feedbacks in our knowledge frameworks...

Few biodiversity indicators are available that reflect the state of broad-sense biodiversity—rather than of particular taxa—at fine spatial and temporal resolution. One such indicator, the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII), estimates how the average abundance of the native terrestrial species in a region compares with their abundances in the abse...

Correction to: Nature Ecology & Evolution https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01454-8, published online 17 May 2021.

The global impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change are interlinked, but the feedbacks between them are rarely assessed. Areas with greater tree diversity tend to be more productive, providing a greater carbon sink, and biodiversity loss could reduce these natural carbon sinks. Here, we quantify how tree and shrub species richness could affe...

Pollinating species are in decline globally, with land use an important driver. However, most of the evidence on which these claims are made is patchy, based on studies with low taxonomic and geographic representativeness. Here, we model the effect of land-use type and intensity on global pollinator biodiversity, using a local-scale database coveri...

Increasingly intimate associations between human society and the natural environment are driving the emergence of novel pathogens, with devastating consequences for humans and animals alike. Prior to emergence, these pathogens exist within complex ecological systems that are characterized by trophic interactions between parasites, their hosts and t...

Aim: Land-use change leads to local climatic changes, which can induce shifts in community composition. Indeed, human-altered land uses favour species able to tolerate greater temperature and precipitation extremes. However, environmental changes do not impact species uniformly across their distributions, and most research exploring the impacts of...

Striving to feed a population set to reach almost 10 billion people by 2050 in a sustainable way is high on the research and policy agendas. Further intensification and expansion of agricultural lands would be of major concern for the environment and biodiversity. There is, therefore, a need to understand better the impacts on biodiversity from the...

Global biodiversity is undergoing rapid declines, driven in large part by changes to land use and climate. Global models help us to understand the consequences of environmental changes for biodiversity, but tend to neglect important geographical variation in the sensitivity of biodiversity to these changes. Here we test whether biodiversity respons...

Link to PDF: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000632072030820X (paywall) Assessing protected area (PA) effectiveness is key to ensure the objectives of habitat protection are being achieved. There is strong evidence that legal protection reduces loss of natural vegetation, but biodiversity loss can still happen without signif...

Aim Trait data are increasingly being used in studies investigating the impacts of global changes on the structure and functioning of ecological communities. Despite a growing number of trait data collations for terrestrial vertebrates, there is to date no global assessment of the gaps and biases the data present. Here, we assess whether terrestria...

Increased efforts are required to prevent further losses to terrestrial biodiversity and the ecosystem services that it provides1,2. Ambitious targets have been proposed, such as reversing the declining trends in biodiversity³; however, just feeding the growing human population will make this a challenge⁴. Here we use an ensemble of land-use and bi...

Land use change—for example, the conversion of natural habitats to agricultural or urban ecosystems—is widely recognized to influence the risk and emergence of zoonotic disease in humans1,2. However, whether such changes in risk are underpinned by predictable ecological changes remains unclear. It has been suggested that habitat disturbance might c...

Perturbed ecosystems may undergo rapid and non-linear changes, resulting in ‘regime shifts’ to an entirely different ecological state. The need to understand the extent, nature, magnitude and reversibility of these changes is urgent given the profound effects that humans are having on the natural world. General ecosystem models, which simulate the...

Land-use change – cropland expansion or intensification – is necessary to meet the food demand of an increasingly large and wealthy population, and it is one of the largest threats to biodiversity. Agricultural systems are dependent on the ecosystem services that biodiversity provides, including pollination, natural pest control and nutrient cyclin...

A single target comparable to the 2°C climate target may help galvanize biodiversity policy

Supplementary Materials for Climate change contributes to widespread declines among bumble bees across continents. Includes: Materials and Methods Supplementary Text Supplementary Acknowledgements Figures S1-S13 Tables S1-S8 References (22 - 59)

Increasing temperatures and declines One aspect of climate change is an increasing number of days with extreme heat. Soroye et al. analyzed a large dataset of bumble bee occurrences across North America and Europe and found that an increasing frequency of unusually hot days is increasing local extinction rates, reducing colonization and site occupa...

Biodiversity models make an important contribution to our understanding of global biodiversity changes. The effects of different land uses vary across ecosystem types, yet most broad-scale models have failed to account for this variation. The effects of land use may be different in systems characterized by low water availability because of the unus...

The planetary boundary framework presents a ‘planetary dashboard’ of humanity’s globally aggregated performance on a set of environmental issues that endanger the Earth system’s capacity to support humanity. While this framework has been highly influential, a critical shortcoming for its application in sustainability governance is that it currently...

Human land use has caused substantial declines in global species richness. Evidence from different taxonomic groups and geographic regions suggests that land use does not equally impact all organisms within terrestrial ecological communities, and that different functional groups of species may respond differently. In particular, we expect large car...

Anthropogenic land‐use change causes substantial changes in local and global biodiversity. Rare and common species can differ in sensitivity to land‐use change; rare species are expected to be affected more negatively. Rarity may be defined in terms of geographic range size, population density, or breadth of habitat requirements. How these 3 forms...

Rapid human population growth has driven conversion of land for uses such as agriculture, transportation and buildings. The removal of natural vegetation changes local climate, with human‐dominated land uses often warmer and drier than natural habitats. Yet, it remains an open question whether land‐use changes influence the composition of ecologica...

Aim Climate and land‐use change, the greatest pressures on biodiversity, can directly influence each other. One key case is the impact land‐use change has on local climatic conditions: human‐altered areas are often warmer and drier than natural habitats. This can have multiple impacts on biodiversity and is a rapidly developing field of research. H...

Ecological systematic reviews and meta‐analyses have significantly increased our understanding of global biodiversity decline. However, for some ecological groups, incomplete and biased datasets have hindered our ability to construct robust, predictive models. One such group consists of the animal pollinators. Approximately 88% of wild plant specie...

This is the submitted version of a manuscript, submitted to Nature Ecology and Evolution, regarding the Biodiversity Intactness Index.

Biodiversity continues to decline under the effect of multiple human pressures. We give a brief overview of the main pressures on biodiversity, before focusing on the two that have a predominant effect: land-use and climate change. We discuss how interactions between land-use and climate change in terrestrial systems are likely to have greater impa...

Most current research on land‐use intensification addresses its potential to either threaten biodiversity or to boost agricultural production. However, little is known about the simultaneous effects of intensification on biodiversity and yield. To determine the responses of species richness and yield to conventional intensification, we conducted a...