Map-based metric predicts biodiversity loss from agricultural expansion
Bob Yirka
news contributor
An international team of environmentalists, zoologists and land use specialists has developed an extinction probability metric for land that is converted to agriculture. Their is published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Over the past several decades, scientists have found that converting land from its natural state to agricultural purposes displaces the plants and animals that once lived there. Prior research has also shown that as more land has been converted to croplands, many animals are going extinct. More specifically, land conversion poses such a threat to wildlife that the Earth is now considered to be in a period known as the sixth mass extinction.
As such threats have become more well known, governments and conservationists are calling for slowing or stopping land conversion. Unfortunately, most in the field do not see that as an option as the human population continues to grow, forcing the need to grow more food.
In this new study, the research team noted that converting some types of land poses a higher risk of extinction to more species than others. Converting land in the Congo Basin, for example, would put many more species at risk than doing so in northern Europe due to the huge differences in biodiversity. That led them to the idea of creating a metric that could be used to make decisions about land conversion regarding the extinction potential of a given parcel of land.
Using data from a variety of sources (including the International Union for Conservation of Nature and extinctions from prior land conversions), the researchers developed what they call Land-cover Change Impacts of Future Extinctions, (LIFE)鈥攁n easy-to-use, map-based metric that can give users a near-instant score for a given piece of land. LIFE can be used to score overall extinction risk or risk for individual species, and is accurate on land plots from 0.5 to 1000 square kilometers.
The tool, the researchers suggest, could help shift land conversion to places where it will do the least amount of harm to wildlife.
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More information: Alison Eyres et al, LIFE: A metric for mapping the impact of land-cover change on global extinctions, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2025).
Journal information: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
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