TY - JOUR
T1 - A world at risk
T2 - Aggregating development trends to forecast global habitat conversion
AU - Oakleaf, James R.
AU - Kennedy, Christina M.
AU - Baruch-Mordo, Sharon
AU - West, Paul C.
AU - Gerber, James S.
AU - Jarvis, Larissa
AU - Kiesecker, Joseph
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Oakleaf et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2015/10/7
Y1 - 2015/10/7
N2 - A growing and more affluent human population is expected to increase the demand for resources and to accelerate habitat modification, but by how much and where remains unknown. Here we project and aggregate global spatial patterns of expected urban and agricultural expansion, conventional and unconventional oil and gas, coal, solar, wind, biofuels and mining development. Cumulatively, these threats place at risk 20% of the remaining global natural lands (19.68 million km2) and could result in half of the world's biomes becoming >50% converted while doubling and tripling the extent of land converted in South America and Africa, respectively. Regionally, substantial shifts in land conversion could occur in Southern and Western South America, Central and Eastern Africa, and the Central Rocky Mountains of North America. With only 5% of the Earth's at-risk natural lands under strict legal protection, estimating and proactively mitigating multi-sector development risk is critical for curtailing the further substantial loss of nature.
AB - A growing and more affluent human population is expected to increase the demand for resources and to accelerate habitat modification, but by how much and where remains unknown. Here we project and aggregate global spatial patterns of expected urban and agricultural expansion, conventional and unconventional oil and gas, coal, solar, wind, biofuels and mining development. Cumulatively, these threats place at risk 20% of the remaining global natural lands (19.68 million km2) and could result in half of the world's biomes becoming >50% converted while doubling and tripling the extent of land converted in South America and Africa, respectively. Regionally, substantial shifts in land conversion could occur in Southern and Western South America, Central and Eastern Africa, and the Central Rocky Mountains of North America. With only 5% of the Earth's at-risk natural lands under strict legal protection, estimating and proactively mitigating multi-sector development risk is critical for curtailing the further substantial loss of nature.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0138334
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0138334
M3 - Article
C2 - 26445282
AN - SCOPUS:84948672671
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 10
JO - PloS one
JF - PloS one
IS - 10
M1 - e0138334
ER -
