Dataset Information

Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools.

ABSTRACT: Urban land-cover change threatens biodiversity and affects ecosystem productivity through loss of habitat, biomass, and carbon storage. However, despite projections that world urban populations will increase to nearly 5 billion by 2030, little is known about future locations, magnitudes, and rates of urban expansion. Here we develop spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land-cover change and explore the direct impacts on biodiversity hotspots and tropical carbon biomass. If current trends in population density continue and all areas with high probabilities of urban expansion undergo change, then by 2030, urban land cover will increase by 1.2 million km(2), nearly tripling the global urban land area circa 2000. This increase would result in considerable loss of habitats in key biodiversity hotspots, with the highest rates of forecasted urban growth to take place in regions that were relatively undisturbed by urban development in 2000: the Eastern Afromontane, the Guinean Forests of West Africa, and the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka hotspots. Within the pan-tropics, loss in vegetation biomass from areas with high probability of urban expansion is estimated to be 1.38 PgC (0.05 PgC yr(-1)), equal to ?5% of emissions from tropical deforestation and land-use change. Although urbanization is often considered a local issue, the aggregate global impacts of projected urban expansion will require significant policy changes to affect future growth trajectories to minimize global biodiversity and vegetation carbon losses.

SUBMITTER: Seto KC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3479537 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools.

Seto Karen C KC Güneralp Burak B Hutyra Lucy R LR

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20120917 40

Urban land-cover change threatens biodiversity and affects ecosystem productivity through loss of habitat, biomass, and carbon storage. However, despite projections that world urban populations will increase to nearly 5 billion by 2030, little is known about future locations, magnitudes, and rates of urban expansion. Here we develop spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land-cover change and explore the direct impacts on biodiversity hotspots and tropical carbon biomass. If ...[more]

PMID: 22988086

Similar Datasets

Project description:An often-invoked benefit of high biodiversity is the provision of ecosystem services. However, evidence for this is largely based on data from small-scale experimental studies of relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem function that may have little relevance to real-world systems. Here, large-scale biodiversity datasets are used to test the relationship between the yield of inland capture fisheries and species richness from 100 countries.Inland waters of Africa, Europe and parts of Asia.A multimodel inference approach was used to assess inland fishery yields at the country level against species richness, waterside human population, area, elevation and various climatic variables, to determine the relative importance of species richness to fisheries yields compared with other major large-scale drivers. Secondly, the mean decadal variation in fishery yields at the country level for 1981-2010 was regressed against species richness to assess if greater diversity reduces the variability in yields over time.Despite a widespread reliance on targeting just a few species of fish, freshwater fish species richness is highly correlated with yield (R (2)?=?0.55) and remains an important and statistically significant predictor of yield once other macroecological drivers are controlled for. Freshwater richness also has a significant negative relationship with variability of yield over time in Africa (R (2)?=?0.16) but no effect in Europe.The management of inland waters should incorporate the protection of freshwater biodiversity, particularly in countries with the highest-yielding inland fisheries as these also tend to have high freshwater biodiversity. As these results suggest a link between biodiversity and stable, high-yielding fisheries, an important win-win outcome may be possible for food security and conservation of freshwater ecosystems. However, findings also highlight the urgent need for more data to fully understand and monitor the contribution of biodiversity to inland fisheries globally.

Dataset Information

Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools.

Publications

Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets