Is biodiversity as intact as we think it is?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Ecology
- Keywords
- biodiversity indicators, IPBES, CBD
- Copyright
- © 2019 Martin et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. Is biodiversity as intact as we think it is? PeerJ Preprints 7:e27575v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27575v1
Abstract
The Biodiversity Intactness Index measures the average abundance of wild species relative to that in pre-modern times. Recently BII was mapped at a global scale by Newbold et al and consequently has gained traction in policy circles. However, we have some concerns about the accuracy of this map. For example, BII exceeds 90% in many areas that have suffered widespread habitat loss. We show here that BII shows little relationship with the intactness of vegetation biomass (BMI) and that BII is higher than BMI in most locations. In addition, Human Footprint is strongly correlated with BMI but not BII. These patterns are worrying, but we do not understand why they occur. We recommend rigorous further testing of the BII before it is used to inform policy.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.
Supplemental Information
R code for data processing and analysis to reproduce Figure 1
This is the R code to allow for reproduction of Figure 1 included in the article.