Monitoring biodiversity loss in rapidly changing Afrotropical ecosystems: an emerging imperative for governance and research

Participatory and Spatially Explicit Assessment to Envision the Future of Land-Use/Land-Cover Change Scenarios on Selected Ecosystem Services in Southwestern Ghana

Settlement expansion and commercial agriculture affect landscape sustainability and ecosystem service provision. Integrated landscape approaches are promoted to negotiate trade-offs between competing land uses and their reconciliation. Incorporating local perceptions of landscape dynamics as basis for such negotiations is particularly relevant for sub-Saharan Africa, where most people depend on natural ecosystems for livelihoods and well-being. This study applied participatory scenario building and spatially explicit simulation to unravel perceptions of the potential impact of rubber and settlement expansion on the provision of selected ecosystem services in southwestern Ghana under a business-as-usual scenario. We collected data in workshops and expert surveys on locally relevant ecosystem services, their indicator values, and the probable land-use transitions. The data was translated into an assessment matrix and integrated into a spatially explicit modeling platform, allowing visualization and comparison of the impact on ecosystem service provision of land-use scenarios under rubber plantation and settlement expansion. The results show the capacity of current (2020) and future land-use patterns to provide locally relevant ecosystem services, indicating a decline in capacity of ecosystem service provisioning in the future compared to the 2020 land-use patterns, a threat to the benefits humans derive from ecosystems. This highlights urgent need for policies and measures to control the drivers of land-use/land-cover change. Furthermore, the results emphasize the importance of diversifying land-use/land-cover types for sustainable landscape development. The paper contributes new insights into how spatially explicit and semi-quantitative methods can make stakeholder perceptions of landscape dynamics explicit as a basis for implementing integrated landscape approaches.

Monitoring the fabric of nature: using allometric trophic network models and observations to assess policy effects on biodiversity

Species diversity underpins all ecosystem services that support life. Despite this recognition and the great advances in detecting biodiversity, exactly how many and which species co-occur and interact, directly or indirectly in any ecosystem is unknown. Biodiversity accounts are incomplete; taxonomically, size, habitat, mobility or rarity biased. In the ocean, the provisioning of fish, invertebrates and algae is a fundamental ecosystem service. This extracted biomass depends on a myriad of microscopic and macroscopic organisms that make up the fabric of nature and which are affected by management actions. Monitoring them all and attributing changes to management policies is daunting. Here we propose that dynamic quantitative models of species interactions can be used to link management policy and compliance with complex ecological networks. This allows managers to qualitatively identify 'interaction-indicator' species, which are highly impacted by management policies through propagation of complex ecological interactions. We ground the approach in intertidal kelp harvesting in Chile and fishers' compliance with policies. Results allow us to identify sets of species that respond to management policy and/or compliance, but which are often not included in standardized monitoring. The proposed approach aids in the design of biodiversity programmes that attempt to connect management with biodiversity change. This article is part of the theme issue 'Detecting and attributing the causes of biodiversity change: needs, gaps and solutions'.

Camera trapping expands the view into global biodiversity and its change

Growing threats to biodiversity demand timely, detailed information on species occurrence, diversity and abundance at large scales. Camera traps (CTs), combined with computer vision models, provide an efficient method to survey species of certain taxa with high spatio-temporal resolution. We test the potential of CTs to close biodiversity knowledge gaps by comparing CT records of terrestrial mammals and birds from the recently released Wildlife Insights platform to publicly available occurrences from many observation types in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. In locations with CTs, we found they sampled a greater number of days (mean = 133 versus 57 days) and documented additional species (mean increase of 1% of expected mammals). For species with CT data, we found CTs provided novel documentation of their ranges (93% of mammals and 48% of birds). Countries with the largest boost in data coverage were in the historically underrepresented southern hemisphere. Although embargoes increase data providers' willingness to share data, they cause a lag in data availability. Our work shows that the continued collection and mobilization of CT data, especially when combined with data sharing that supports attribution and privacy, has the potential to offer a critical lens into biodiversity. This article is part of the theme issue 'Detecting and attributing the causes of biodiversity change: needs, gaps and solutions'.

Economic factors underlying biodiversity loss

Contemporary economic thinking does not acknowledge that the human economy is embedded in Nature; it instead treats humanity as a customer that draws on Nature. In this paper, we present a grammar for economic reasoning that is not built on that error. The grammar is based on a comparison between our demand for Nature's maintenance and regulating services and her ability to supply them on a sustainable basis. The comparison is then used to show that for measuring economic well-being, national statistical offices should estimate an inclusive measure of their economies' wealth and its distribution, not GDP and its distribution. The concept of 'inclusive wealth' is then used to identify policy instruments that ought to be used to manage such global public goods as the open seas and tropical rainforests. Trade liberalization without heed paid to the fate of local ecosystems from which primary products are drawn and exported by developing countries leads to a transfer of inclusive wealth from there to rich importing countries. Humanity's embeddedness in Nature has far-reaching implications for the way we should view human activities-in households, communities, nations and the world. This article is part of the theme issue 'Detecting and attributing the causes of biodiversity change: needs, gaps and solutions'.

Detecting and attributing the causes of biodiversity change: needs, gaps and solutions

This issue addresses the multifaceted problems of understanding biodiversity change to meet emerging international development and conservation goals, national economic accounting and diverse community needs. Recent international agreements highlight the need to establish monitoring and assessment programmes at national and regional levels. We identify an opportunity for the research community to develop the methods for robust detection and attribution of biodiversity change that will contribute to national assessments and guide conservation action. The 16 contributions of this issue address six major aspects of biodiversity assessment: connecting policy to science, establishing observation, improving statistical estimation, detecting change, attributing causes and projecting the future. These studies are led by experts in Indigenous studies, economics, ecology, conservation, statistics, and computer science, with representations from Asia, Africa, South America, North America and Europe. The results place biodiversity science in the context of policy needs and provide an updated roadmap for how to observe biodiversity change in a way that supports conservation action via robust detection and attribution science. This article is part of the theme issue 'Detecting and attributing the causes of biodiversity change: needs, gaps and solutions'.