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Abstract Land conservation and increased carbon uptake on land are fundamental to achieving the ambitious targets of the climate and biodiversity conventions. Yet, it remains largely unknown how such ambitions, along with an increasing demand for agricultural products, could drive landscape-scale changes and affect other key regulating nature’s contributions to people (NCP) that sustain land productivity outside conservation priority areas. By using an integrated, globally consistent modelling approach, we show that ambitious carbon-focused land restoration action and the enlargement of protected areas alone may be insufficient to reverse negative trends in landscape heterogeneity, pollination supply, and soil loss. However, we also find that these actions could be combined with dedicated interventions that support critical NCP and biodiversity conservation outside of protected areas. In particular, our models indicate that conserving at least 20% semi-natural habitat within farmed landscapes could primarily be achieved by spatially relocating cropland outside conservation priority areas, without additional carbon losses from land-use change, primary land conversion or reductions in agricultural productivity.
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Intensive primary forest loss on the island of Hispaniola from 1996 to 2022
Primary forest (PF) is critical in supporting biodiversity and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. However, the continuous monitoring of PF loss through remote sensing time-series observations remains largely unexplored, particularly in undeveloped and developing countries. In this study, we use the COntinuous monitoring of Land Disturbance (COLD) algorithm and Landsat time-series data to quantify PF loss on the island of Hispaniola, including Haiti and the Dominican Republic, from 1996 to 2022. The major findings include: (1) Haiti experienced a more pronounced PF loss compared to the Dominican Republic despite its lower PF coverage. From 1996 to 2022, PF in Haiti decreased from 0.64% to 0.35%, while PF in Dominican Republic decreased from 7.17% to 4.89%. (2) PF loss is observed both inside and outside protected areas. In Haiti, more PF loss occurs within protected areas than outside those areas. In the Dominican Republic, PF loss rates inside and outside protected areas are comparable. (3) The mean topographic slope of PF shows an increasing trend through time in both Haiti and Dominican Republic, suggesting slope plays a key role in PF loss. Despite the disparities between Haiti and Dominican Republic in preserving PF, urgent conservation policies are needed for the whole island. The land cover maps framework can be extended beyond the island of Hispaniola to larger regions for evaluating the impacts of PF loss on biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2326013
- PAR ID:
- 10642686
- Publisher / Repository:
- AGU Fall Meeting 2023, Session: Biogeosciences, 2023AGUFM.B52C..08H
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- San Francisco, CA, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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