Across the globe, no other human activity currently affects the survival of wildlife species more than where we choose to grow our food. Alongside other impacts like hunting and climate change, agricultural production is helping to drive what scientists call Earth’s sixth mass extinction, with roughly three times more extinctions happening now than expected to occur naturally. The most recent Living Planet report led by WWF documented a 73% average slide in wildlife populations since 1970. Amid the gravity of the situation, researchers have been searching for ways to halt or even reverse the decline. With that goal in mind, an international team of scientists has developed a tool to help understand the implications of converting forests and other ecosystems to farmland — and what’s to be gained from protecting and restoring areas as well. The team calls the metric “Land-cover change Impacts of Future Extinctions,” or LIFE. They published their work Jan. 9 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Each LIFE score represents how a species would be impacted in a specified area of habitat if that ecosystem were converted to agriculture or restored. The underlying analysis harnesses high-performance computing to combine habitat information from the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, with global land-cover data for more than 30,000 species of vertebrates. The idea is to provide “off-the-shelf” map layers to guide decision-making about land-use change, lead author Alison Eyres, a postdoctoral research associate in zoology at the University of Cambridge in…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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