Multiple facets of biodiversity are threatened by mining-induced land-use change in the Brazilian Amazon

Aim 
Mining is increasingly pressuring areas of critical importance for biodiversity conservation, such as the Brazilian Amazon. Biodiversity data are limited in the tropics, restricting the scope for risks to be appropriately estimated before mineral licencing decisions are made. As the distributions and range sizes of other taxa differ markedly from those of vertebrates – the common proxy for analysis of risk to biodiversity from mining – whether mining threatens lesser-studied taxonomic groups differentially at a regional scale is unclear.
Location
Brazilian Amazon
Methods
We assess risks to several facets of biodiversity from industrial mining by comparing mining areas (within 70km of an active mining lease) and areas unaffected by mining, employing species richness, species endemism, phylogenetic diversity, and phylogenetic endemism metrics calculated for angiosperms, arthropods, and vertebrates.
Results
Mining areas contained higher densities of species occurrence records than ..., Database Assembly
Mapping Mining Areas
We obtained spatial information on mineral prospecting and mineral mining leases within the Brazilian Amazon from SIGMINE (Sistema de Informações Geográficas da Mineração; DNPM, 2012). This database catalogues all registered legal mining activities within Brazil, detailing the extent of each activity, dates of operation, and mined commodities. To map ‘mining leases’ of industrial-scale mineral mines, we selected records greater than 100 hectares in area and classified as mining concessions (Concessão de Lavra) and omitted leases extracting water or those classified as small-scale artisanal operations (Lavra Garimpeira). This resulted in 411 polygons (including active leases and adjacent extensions of such leases) of 15,750 km2 in total area, with mining start dates ranging from 1944 to 2017 (mean = 1978, sd = 11.9; Fig. 1). To map ‘mining areas,’ which include the direct (i.e., immediate land-use change resulting from mineral extraction) and indire..., GIS Software, e.g. ArcGIS, R, GRASS, QGIS.
Dinamica Environmental Modelling Software, with BioDinamica plug-in. Available at <https://csr.ufmg.br/dinamica/>