Towards more meaningful scenarios of biodiversity responses to land-use change in Central Asia
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COMMENTARY
Towards more meaningful scenarios of biodiversity responses to land-use change in Central Asia Johannes Kamp 1
&
Martin Freitag 1 & Norbert Hölzel 1
Received: 31 March 2020 / Accepted: 26 May 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract We here respond to Nunez et al. (Reg Environ Chang 20:39, 2020), recently published in Regional Environmental Change. Nunez et al. project biodiversity responses to land-use and climate change in Central Asia. Their projections are based on scenarios of changing socio-economic and environmental conditions for the years 2040, 2070, and 2100. We suggest that the predicted magnitude of biodiversity loss might be biased high, due to four shortfalls in the data used and the methods employed. These are (i) the use of an inadequate measure of “biodiversity intactness,” (ii) a failure to acknowledge for large spatial variation in land-use trends across the five considered Central Asian countries, (iii) the assumption of a strictly linear, negative relationship between livestock grazing intensity and the abundance of animals and plants, and (iv) the extrapolation of grazing-related biodiversity responses into areas of cropland. We conclude that future scenarios of biodiversity response to regional environmental change in Central Asia will benefit from using regional, not global, spatial data on livestock distribution and land-use patterns. The use of extra-regional data on the relationships between biodiversity and land-use or climate should be avoided. Keywords Livestock . Grazing . Steppe . Fire . Saiga antelope . Post-Soviet
In a recently published paper in Regional Environmental Change, Nunez et al. (2020) develop scenarios of future land-use and climate change for Central Asia. They use these to project biodiversity responses to environmental change in the region in the years 2040, 2070, and 2100. We welcome the study by Nunez et al. because regional environmental change, especially land-use change, is difficult to predict across Central Asia, and because few have attempted to project biodiversity responses across larger scales in this region. However, we are concerned that the published scenarios suffer from four shortcomings that compromise their usefulness for guiding regional and global policies. First, a major aim of Nunez et al. is to project how Central Asian biodiversity will react to climate and land-use change, but their definition of biodiversity remains elusive. The only biodiversity metric employed is a measure of “intactness”: the This paper is a Commentary to https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-020-01619-4 * Johannes Kamp [email protected] 1
Institute of Landscape Ecology, University of Muenster, Heisenbergstr. 2, 48149 Muenster, Germany
relative mean abundance (Alkemade et al. 2013) of all animal and plant species in pristine ecosystems in relation to their abundance in degraded states of that ecosystem. The index is based on a relationship that is considered globally universal, despite being established from a review of a mere 28 studies (three to eight
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