Habitat loss and exploitation are the most prevalent threats impacting vertebrate populations
Image Credit: University of Bristol
Scientific Frontline: "At a Glance" Summary
- Main Discovery: Vertebrate populations exposed to combinatorial threats—including climate change, disease, pollution, and invasive species—decline significantly faster than those affected by single, widely recognized pressures like habitat loss or exploitation.
- Methodology: Researchers utilized Bayesian statistical models to analyze trends across 3,129 vertebrate populations from the WWF Living Planet Database (1950–2020) and conducted simulated 'what-if' scenarios to estimate population responses to various threat-removal strategies.
- Key Data: The study quantified the interacting drivers of biodiversity loss across 3,129 vertebrate populations worldwide over a 70-year period.
- Significance: This analysis provides the first global, population-level evidence that mitigating threats in isolation is insufficient to reverse decline trends, confirming that achieving population stability requires addressing multiple interacting pressures simultaneously.
- Future Application: International biodiversity agreements and conservation policies must transition from single-threat interventions to coordinated strategies that combine habitat protection, climate mitigation, pollution reduction, and invasive species control.
- Branch of Science: Conservation Biology and Quantitative Ecology
- Additional Detail: While simultaneous mitigation is optimal, simulations suggest that if resource constraints force a focus on a single threat, prioritizing the reduction of overexploitation, habitat loss, or climate change yields the greatest relative global benefit.
Efforts to stop declines in vertebrate wildlife populations should aim to address multiple threats simultaneously, rather than focusing on pressures one by one, a new study led by the University of Bristol has found.
The new study provides the first global, population-level evidence to quantify how interacting threats drive biodiversity loss across animal populations. The findings have been published this week in Science Advances.
Researchers analyzed population trends from 3,129 vertebrate populations worldwide between 1950 and 2020 and found that those exposed to combinations of threats such as climate change, disease, pollution and invasive species, are declining faster than those only affected by more widely recognized pressures such as habitat loss or exploitation.
“Conservation efforts have traditionally focused on the most widespread threats, such as habitat destruction or overexploitation,” said co-lead author Dr Pol Capdevila, who carried out the research while at the University of Bristol but is now based at the University of Barcelona. “Our results show that other pressures, including disease, invasive species, pollution, and climate change, can lead to even faster population declines, especially when they occur together,” he added.
While biodiversity loss has been extensively studied, much of the existing research has focused on species-level assessments or global summaries that do not capture how threats interact over time within individual populations.
The study combined data from WWF’s Living Planet Database with Bayesian statistical models to analyse population trends across time, geography, and taxonomic groups. The modelling framework allowed the team to estimate how populations might have changed if threats had been removed individually or as a group.
To explore solutions, researchers used advanced statistical models to simulate ‘what-if’ scenarios, estimating how vertebrate populations might respond if threats were reduced or removed.
Co-lead author Dr Duncan O’Brien, Senior Research Associate in Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, added: “Our findings make it clear that conservation action must be coordinated across multiple pressures. Tackling threats one at a time will not be enough to halt ongoing biodiversity loss.”
Their analysis showed that mitigating multiple threats together is essential to achieving stable or recovering vertebrate populations, and that single-threat interventions are unlikely to reverse global decline trends. However, if only one threat can be prioritized, then reducing overexploitation, habitat loss, or climate change impacts would likely deliver the greatest global benefits.
The findings have important implications for governments, conservation organizations, and international biodiversity agreements. The research suggests that effective conservation strategies should combine actions such as habitat protection, climate mitigation, pollution reduction, and invasive species control, rather than focusing on individual threats in isolation.
Reference material: What Is: Conservation
Published in journal: Science Advances
Title: Halting predicted vertebrate declines requires tackling multiple drivers of biodiversity loss
Authors: Pol Capdevila, Duncan O’Brien, Valentina Marconi, Thomas F. Johnson, Robin Freeman, Louise Mcrae, and Christopher F. Clements
Source/Credit: University of Bristol
Reference Number: cons021226_02
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