Quantifying Land Use Impacts on Biodiversity: Combining Species–Area Models and Vulnerability Indicators

Habitat
degradation and subsequent biodiversity damage often take
place far from the place of consumption because of globalization and
the increasing level of international trade. Informing consumers and
policy makers about the biodiversity impacts “hidden”
in the life cycle of imported products is an important step toward
achieving sustainable consumption patterns. Spatially explicit methods
are needed in life cycle assessment to accurately quantify biodiversity
impacts of products and processes. We use the Countryside species–area
relationship (SAR) to quantify regional species loss due to land occupation
and transformation for five taxa and six land use types in 804 terrestrial
ecoregions. Further, we calculate vulnerability scores for each ecoregion
based on the fraction of each species’ geographic range (endemic
richness) hosted by the ecoregion and the IUCN assigned threat level
of each species. Vulnerability scores are multiplied with SAR-predicted
regional species loss to estimate potential global extinctions per
unit of land use. As a case study, we assess the land use biodiversity
impacts of 1 kg of bioethanol produced using six different feed stocks
in different parts of the world. Results show that the regions with
highest biodiversity impacts differed markedly when the vulnerability
of species was included.