LIFE: A metric for quantitively mapping the impact of land-cover change on global extinctions

Tracking and preventing continued extinctions requires robust spatially explicit metrics quantifying the impacts of human activities on habitat extent. Existing metrics either fail to consider species identity or focus solely on recent habitat losses. The persistence score approach represented an important development by combining species ecologies and land-cover data whilst considering the cumulative and non-linear impact of past habitat loss on species’ probability of persistence. However, it is computationally demanding, limiting its global use and application. Here we couple the persistence score approach with high-performance computing to generate global maps of what we term the LIFE (Land-cover change Impacts on Future Extinctions) metric for 29153 species of terrestrial vertebrates at 1 arc-minute resolution (3.4km2 at the equator). These maps quantify, for the first time, the marginal changes in the expected number of extinctions caused by (1) converting remaining natural vegetation to agriculture, and (2) restoring farmland to natural habitat. We demonstrate statistically that this approach integrates information on species richness, endemism, and past habitat loss. Our resulting maps can reliably be used at scales from 0.5-1000km2, and offer unprecedented opportunities to estimate the impact on extinctions of diverse actions, from dietary choices right through to global protected area development.