- Altering natural habitats for agriculture is the single biggest driver of extinctions.
- Land conversion is contributing to what scientists call Earth’s sixth mass extinction.
- Now, new maps link the conversion of landscapes to the risk of extinction for species; they also help identify places where restoration could increase the probability that species will survive.
- The tool works accurately on areas of land ranging from 0.5-1,000 km² (0.2-386 mi²), and could be used by consumers and conservation groups to identify key areas to prioritize for conservation or restoration.
Across the globe, no other human activity currently affects the survival of wildlife species more than where we choose to grow our food. Alongside other impacts like hunting and climate change, agricultural production is helping to drive what scientists call Earth’s sixth mass extinction, with roughly three times more extinctions happening now than expected to occur naturally. The most recent Living Planet report led by WWF documented a 73% average slide in wildlife populations since 1970.
Amid the gravity of the situation, researchers have been searching for ways to halt or even reverse the decline. With that goal in mind, an international team of scientists has developed a tool to help understand the implications of converting forests and other ecosystems to farmland — and what’s to be gained from protecting and restoring areas as well. The team calls the metric “Land-cover change Impacts of Future Extinctions,” or LIFE. They published their work Jan. 9 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Each LIFE score represents how a species would be impacted in a specified area of habitat if that ecosystem were converted to agriculture or restored. The underlying analysis harnesses high-performance computing to combine habitat information from the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, with global land-cover data for more than 30,000 species of vertebrates.
The idea is to provide “off-the-shelf” map layers to guide decision-making about land-use change, lead author Alison Eyres, a postdoctoral research associate in zoology at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., told Mongabay. Their testing suggests LIFE is accurate on areas of land ranging from 0.5-1,000 square kilometers (0.2-386 square miles).
Noodling around with the team’s maps can reveal noticeable variations in the risk of extinction to various species in different regions, with implications for sourcing the goods we use every day. For example, clearing a hectare of forest in the Congo Basin will nudge far more species toward extinction than doing the same in northern Europe — the former is much more biodiverse than the latter. Companies could also use these maps to boost their sustainability by sourcing goods from places where extinctions are less likely. Or, individual consumers might use them to understand how their consumption choices affect species’ habitats.
Eyres said study co-author Thomas Ball is leveraging the data to peg the differences in extinction risk of various diets, such as vegan, vegetarian and standard diets. The maps could also help conservation groups pinpoint key areas for protection or restoration — or areas worth taking on corporations over.
LIFE builds on the researchers’ previous work in which they developed persistence scores for wildlife and plants living in the Brazilian Cerrado, a biodiverse and imperiled savanna. However, they found it took too long to calculate the extinction risk for species in the Cerrado for the approach to be practical on a global level. Now, by harnessing the power of supercomputing, the team has whittled down the time it takes to do such calculations to a single day from three weeks previously.
Like the work in the Cerrado, which was led by co-author América Paz Durán of the Austral University of Chile, the LIFE metric incorporates the amount of habitat a species may have lost in the past. That’s something most similar tools don’t do, but it’s important because extinction risk tends to be nonlinear; that is, it increases more quickly as more of a species’ habitat disappears.
“LIFE is really interesting because of the spatially explicit way that you can look at the impact of land-use change,” said Louise Mair, a research fellow in global biodiversity and conservation policy at the U.K.’s Newcastle University, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It does allow you to ask some really interesting questions about historic impacts of land-use change.
“It’s quite an exciting piece of work,” Mair added.
In 2021, Mair and her colleagues produced a different measure of extinction risk called STAR, short for species threat abatement and restoration. Though their goals are similar, one metric might be preferable over the other depending on the situation, she said. LIFE is geared toward “high-level land-use change questions,” Mair added, whereas STAR works better on a local level.
“STAR is designed to help you identify within your particular area what it is you actually need to be doing, what threats you need to tackle, and how you should plan that kind of thing,” she said.
The approaches to calculating risk are also unique. LIFE incorporates the habitats of all vertebrate species that have been assessed for the IUCN Red List, including those designated as being of least concern, while STAR focuses on animals closer to extinction — that is, those identified as near threatened to critically endangered.
STAR also incorporates other threats that can lead to extinctions beyond land-use change, which Eyres acknowledges is a current limitation of LIFE.
“We know that there’s lots of other factors which will actually determine whether that habitat is really suitable,” she said. “You could have forest present, but there might be lots of hunting. Or it might be really damaged forest, which isn’t suitable for species, so I want to include some of that nuance and other pressures into the analysis.”
Mair said it’s also important to note the way LIFE currently considers the benefits of restoration compared to the drawbacks of conversion, particularly in contexts where it’s used to make land-use decisions.
“It’s effectively saying for any given area, if your species composition is the same, then habitat restoration is as positive as habitat loss would be negative,” she said, “and we know that, ecologically, that’s not true.
“Restoration is a really important tool, but it’s an important tool in specific circumstances,” Mair added. “You wouldn’t want the metric to be used in a way that would allow decision-makers to say, ‘Oh, it’s OK to destroy this area of habitat because we’re going to restore here.’ Those kinds of decisions are far more complex.”
Eyres agreed that was a critical “caveat” for LIFE. “A loss in conservation isn’t exactly opposite of a restoration gain,” she said. “Conserving something is a guarantee, and restoring something is a hypothetical,” which may or may not help species survive.
“It relies on a lot of factors going right,” Eyres added.
The authors write that comparing the potential benefits of restoration to the drawbacks of conversion points to the need for prioritizing conservation.
“It was quite striking that we still have way more to gain from conserving land,” Eyres said.
As Mair sees it, that finding is “a really clear reinforcement” of a key message: “The biggest thing we can do to prevent species extinctions is conserve existing habitat and avoid any further habitat loss.”
Banner image: A giant anteater, listed as vulnerable in the IUCN Red List, on agricultural land in the Cerrado. Image by wictorrosenthal_face via Pixabay (Public domain).
John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.
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Citations:
Durán, A. P., H. Green, J. M., West, C. D., Visconti, P., Burgess, N. D., Virah-Sawmy, M., & Balmford, A. (2020). A practical approach to measuring the biodiversity impacts of land conversion. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 11(8), 910-921. doi:10.1111/2041-210X.13427
Eyres, A., Ball, T. S., Dales, M., Swinfield, T., Arnell, A., Baisero, D., … Balmford, A. (2025). LIFE: A metric for mapping the impact of land-cover change on global extinctions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 380(1917). doi:10.1098/rstb.2023.0327
Mair, L., Bennun, L. A., Brooks, T. M., Butchart, S. H., Bolam, F. C., Burgess, N. D., . . . McGowan, P. J. (2021). A metric for spatially explicit contributions to science-based species targets. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 5(6), 836-844. doi:10.1038/s41559-021-01432-0
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