Global trends and scenarios for terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services from 1900 to 2050.

Based on an extensive model intercomparison, we assessed trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services from historical reconstructions and future scenarios of land-use and climate change. During the 20th century, biodiversity declined globally by 2 to 11%, as estimated by a range of indicators. Provisioning ecosystem services increased several fold, and regulating services decreased moderately.

Leveraging satellite observations to reveal ecological drivers of pest densities across landscapes.

Landscape ecologists have long suggested that pest abundances increase in simplified, monoculture landscapes. However, tests of this theory often fail to predict pest population sizes in real-world agricultural fields. These failures may arise not only from variation in pest ecology, but also from the widespread use of categorical land-use maps that do not adequately characterize habitat-availability for pests.

Mapping the planet's critical areas for biodiversity and nature's contributions to people.

Meeting global commitments to conservation, climate, and sustainable development requires consideration of synergies and tradeoffs among targets. We evaluate the spatial congruence of ecosystems providing globally high levels of nature's contributions to people, biodiversity, and areas with high development potential across several sectors. We find that conserving approximately half of global land area through protection or sustainable management could provide 90% of the current levels of ten of nature's contributions to people and meet minimum representation targets for 26,709 terrestrial vertebrate species.

Diverse values of nature for sustainability.

Twenty-five years since foundational publications on valuing ecosystem services for human well-being, addressing the global biodiversity crisis still implies confronting barriers to incorporating nature's diverse values into decision-making. These barriers include powerful interests supported by current norms and legal rules such as property rights, which determine whose values and which values of nature are acted on. A better understanding of how and why nature is (under)valued is more urgent than ever.

Model ensembles of ecosystem services fill global certainty and capacity gaps.

Sustaining ecosystem services (ES) critical to human well-being is hindered by many practitioners lacking access to ES models ("the capacity gap") or knowledge of the accuracy of available models ("the certainty gap"), especially in the world's poorer regions. We developed ensembles of multiple models at an unprecedented global scale for five ES of high policy relevance. Ensembles were 2 to 14% more accurate than individual models.

Un-yielding: Evidence for the agriculture transformation we need.

There has been a seismic shift in the center of gravity of scientific writing and thinking about agriculture over the past decades, from a prevailing focus on maximizing yields toward a goal of balancing trade-offs and ensuring the delivery of multiple ecosystem services. Maximizing crop yields often results in a system where most benefits accrue to very few (in the form of profits), alongside irreparable environmental harm to agricultural ecosystems, landscapes, and people. Here, we present evidence that an un-yielding, which we define as de-emphasizing the importance of yields alone, is necessary to achieve the goal of a more Food secure, Agrobiodiverse, Regenerative, Equitable and just (FARE) agriculture.

Increasing crop field size does not consistently exacerbate insect pest problems.

Increasing diversity on farms can enhance many key ecosystem services to and from agriculture, and natural control of arthropod pests is often presumed to be among them. The expectation that increasing the size of monocultural crop plantings exacerbates the impact of pests is common throughout the agroecological literature. However, the theoretical basis for this expectation is uncertain; mechanistic mathematical models suggest instead that increasing field size can have positive, negative, neutral, or even nonlinear effects on arthropod pest densities.

Archetype models upscale understanding of natural pest control response to land-use change.

Control of crop pests by shifting host plant availability and natural enemy activity at landscape scales has great potential to enhance the sustainability of agriculture. However, mainstreaming natural pest control requires improved understanding of how its benefits can be realized across a variety of agroecological contexts. Empirical studies suggest significant but highly variable responses of natural pest control to land-use change.

Biodiversity and infrastructure interact to drive tourism to and within Costa Rica.

SignificanceTourism accounts for roughly 10% of global gross domestic product, with nature-based tourism its fastest-growing sector in the past 10 years. Nature-based tourism can theoretically contribute to local and sustainable development by creating attractive livelihoods that support biodiversity conservation, but whether tourists prefer to visit more biodiverse destinations is poorly understood. We examine this question in Costa Rica and find that more biodiverse places tend indeed to attract more tourists, especially where there is infrastructure that makes these places more accessible.

Species traits elucidate crop pest response to landscape composition: a global analysis.

Recent synthesis studies have shown inconsistent responses of crop pests to landscape composition, imposing a fundamental limit to our capacity to design sustainable crop protection strategies to reduce yield losses caused by insect pests. Using a global dataset composed of 5242 observations encompassing 48 agricultural pest species and 26 crop species, we tested the role of pest traits (exotic status, host breadth and habitat breadth) and environmental context (crop type, range in landscape gradient and climate) in modifying the pest response to increasing semi-natural habitats in the surrounding landscape. For natives, increasing semi-natural habitats decreased the abundance of pests that exploit only crop habitats or that are highly polyphagous.

Landscape simplification increases vineyard pest outbreaks and insecticide use.

Diversifying agricultural landscapes may mitigate biodiversity declines and improve pest management. Yet landscapes are rarely managed to suppress pests, in part because researchers seldom measure key variables related to pest outbreaks and insecticides that drive management decisions. We used a 13-year government database to analyse landscape effects on European grapevine moth (Lobesia botrana) outbreaks and insecticides across c.

Global synthesis of effects of plant species diversity on trophic groups and interactions.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that plant species diversity enhances ecosystem functioning in terrestrial ecosystems, including diversity effects on insects (herbivores, predators and parasitoids) and plants. However, the effects of increased plant diversity across trophic levels in different ecosystems and biomes have not yet been explored on a global scale. Through a global meta-analysis of 2,914 observations from 351 studies, we found that increased plant species richness reduced herbivore abundance and damage but increased predator and parasitoid abundance, predation, parasitism and overall plant performance.

A coupled forage-grazer model predicts viability of livestock production and wildlife habitat at the regional scale.

Informed management of livestock on rangelands underpins both the livelihoods of communities that depend on livestock for sustenance, and the conservation of wildlife that often depend on livestock-dominated landscapes for habitat. Understanding spatial patterns of rangeland productivity is therefore crucial to designing global development strategies that balance social and environmental benefits. Here we introduce a new rangeland production model that dynamically links the Century ecosystem model with a basic ruminant diet selection and physiology model.

A global synthesis reveals biodiversity-mediated benefits for crop production.

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield-related ecosystem services can be maintained by a few dominant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 studies (with 1475 locations), we partition the relative importance of species richness, abundance, and dominance for pollination; biological pest control; and final yields in the context of ongoing land-use change.

Global modeling of nature's contributions to people.

The magnitude and pace of global change demand rapid assessment of nature and its contributions to people. We present a fine-scale global modeling of current status and future scenarios for several contributions: water quality regulation, coastal risk reduction, and crop pollination. We find that where people's needs for nature are now greatest, nature's ability to meet those needs is declining.

Greenhouse gas footprints of palm oil production in Indonesia over space and time.

Palm oil, the most widely used vegetable oil, is one of the largest drivers of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from global land use and land cover change. Here, we provide fine-resolution (100 m × 100 m) estimates of GHG footprints of current (2015) and potential future scenarios (2030) of crude palm oil (CPO) production in Indonesia. The current estimated average GHG footprint excluding production on Java is 5.

Reimagining the potential of Earth observations for ecosystem service assessments.

The benefits nature provides to people, called ecosystem services, are increasingly recognized and accounted for in assessments of infrastructure development, agricultural management, conservation prioritization, and sustainable sourcing. These assessments are often limited by data, however, a gap with tremendous potential to be filled through Earth observations (EO), which produce a variety of data across spatial and temporal extents and resolutions. Despite widespread recognition of this potential, in practice few ecosystem service studies use EO.