Data from: Biodiversity effects of food system sustainability actions from farm to fork

The data archived here are the raw data required to reproduce all analysis presented in a manuscript published in PNAS.

Read, Q. D., Hondula, K. L., & Muth, M. K. Biodiversity effects of food system sustainability actions from farm to fork. PNAS.

This dataset is intended for use with the code archived in the git repository at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5949590. Please refer to the README.md file in that repository for instructions on how to download the data and reproduce the analysis.

Note that the dataset is archived as a set of eight .zip archives. The archives all contain one or more directories. You will need to unzip all the archives into the same root directory to reproduce the directory structure described in the included documentation file.

The data archived here are from a variety of different sources. As much as is practicable, they are presented here in their raw form as they were downloaded, without any processing. All processing steps can be replicated using the code archived in the accompanying code repository.

Manuscript abstract

Diet shifts and food waste reduction have the potential to reduce the land and biodiversity footprint of the food system. In this study, we estimated the amount of land used to produce food consumed in the United States, and the number of species threatened with extinction as a result of that land use. We predicted potential changes to biodiversity threat under scenarios of food waste reduction and shifts to recommended healthy and sustainable diets. Domestically produced beef and dairy, which require vast land areas, and imported fruit, which has an intense impact on biodiversity per unit land, have especially high biodiversity footprints. Adopting the Planetary Health diet or the USDA-recommended vegetarian diet nationwide would reduce the biodiversity footprint of food consumption. However, increases in consumption of foods grown in global biodiversity hotspots both inside and outside the United States, especially fruits and vegetables, would partially offset the reduction. In contrast, the USDA-recommended US-style and Mediterranean-style diets would increase the biodiversity threat due to increased consumption of dairy and farmed fish. Simply halving food waste would benefit global biodiversity over half as much as all Americans simultaneously shifting to a sustainable diet. Combining food waste reduction with adoption of a sustainable diet could reduce the biodiversity footprint of United States food consumption by roughly half. Species facing extinction because of unsustainable food consumption practices could be rescued by reducing agriculture's footprint; diet shifts and food waste reduction can help us get there.