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Global Biodiversity Loss from Tropical Deforestation COMMENTARY

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Global Biodiversity Loss from Tropical Deforestation COMMENTARY COMMENTARY Global biodiversity loss from tropical deforestation COMMENTARY Xingli Giama,1 Tropical forests are incredibly biodiverse; they support at least two-thirds of the world’s biodiversity (1) de- spite covering less than 10% of Earth’s land surface (2). Unfortunately, prospects for tropical forests and the biodiversity therein are becoming increasingly bleak owing to unabated deforestation and forest alteration (3) that stem from human activities such as logging, hunting, agricultural expansion, and hu- man settlement (4, 5) (Fig. 1). Previous studies have summarized how local or subregional biodiversity values differ across primary forests and other land- use types (6, 7), but it is unclear how site- and landscape-level impacts scale up globally. In PNAS, Alroy (8) addresses this challenge by compiling and analyzing a pantropical dataset of 875 local species assemblages sampled in primary forest and 10 other land-use types previously converted from forest. The task of estimating global biodiversity losses that accrue with tropical deforestation might seem straightforward at first. For example, one might approach this problem by collating global distribu- tions of different taxa, removing increasing extents of Fig. 1. Human activities that threaten tropical forests A forest, and then counting the extinctions that accu- and the biodiversity therein. ( ) Logging in Peninsular Malaysia. (B) Oil palm monoculture in Kalimantan, mulate when entire species ranges become defor- Indonesia. (C) Cattle grazing on pastures converted ested. This approach suffers from a number of pitfalls. from forests in Mato Grosso, Brazil. (D) Smallholder First, it assumes populations originally occurring in cropping (of cassava) in Loreto, Peru. (E)Harvesting forests can never survive in altered habitats. Indeed, it of wood for charcoal production in Benin. (F) is well documented that altered forests and other land Hunting threatens many forest species, including the Malayan tiger caught here on a camera trap in uses often support some species previously found in Peninsular Malaysia. Photographs courtesy of Rimba continuous primary forests (9, 10) and that biotic re- (A and F), X.G. (B), Jacob Socolar (C and D), and Orou sponses vary across taxa and disturbance types (6, 7). Gaoue (E). Further, such an analysis would be necessarily limited to the few vertebrate groups with reasonably com- common for ecologists to characterize only intact for- plete and reliable global distribution and habitat in- est communities or compare biotic responses across formation (i.e., amphibians, birds, mammals), precluding different altered habitats. Because human activities groups such as arthropods that make up the over- have been so pervasive in and around tropical for- whelming majority of Earth’s terrestrial macroorganis- ests, there is now a large collection of studies sam- mal diversity (11). pling local species communities in different land uses To examine the impact of a particular disturbance across the tropical forest biome. These local field on species communities, ecologists often identify a studies are an excellent starting point for estimating landscape consisting of undisturbed and disturbed global biodiversity loss because they provide infor- areas and sample ecological communities at sites or mation on species occurring in intact forests as well transects nested within these areas (6, 9, 10). It is also as those species that persist after deforestation or aDepartment of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996 Author contributions: X.G. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper. The author declares no conflict of interest. See companion article on page 6056. 1Email: [email protected]. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1706264114 PNAS | June 6, 2017 | vol. 114 | no. 23 | 5775–5777 Downloaded by guest on October 1, 2021 forest alteration for a large variety of taxa, including particular richness is evaluated is akin to standardizing samples by sampling arthropod groups. completeness. Techniques that standardize sampling complete- Alroy (8) took this approach. To scale up local impacts, he de- ness rather than the number of individuals are recommended vised a creative bootstrapping algorithm in which primary forest because they produce richness estimates that preserve true rich- communities were gradually replaced by randomly chosen com- ness ratios across different communities (16). Although both λ5 munities occurring in other land-use types, thus mimicking the estimator and MS are likely useful for comparing the richness of progression of deforestation and forest alteration. At each step, different communities, a simulation study that evaluates the per- species presences were summed across all sites and species ab- formance of these methods against others via simulated assem- sent from all sites were considered globally extinct. By tracking blages drawn from a variety of species abundance distributions is changes in the number of extant species as communities from required to understand their relative utility better. other land uses replace primary forest communities, Alroy (8) The main goal of Alroy (8) is to estimate the extent of global was able to project how species loss might proceed at the global biodiversity loss with mounting deforestation and forest degradation. scale for different taxonomic or ecological groups as tropical for- ests continue to be altered or lost. By extrapolating samples of local species Interestingly, there was notable variation in both the extent assemblages, Alroy estimates global biodiversity and shape of biodiversity loss across different groups of organ- isms. Reductions in global species richness following complete losses equaling a mass extinction event if forest degradation and deforestation ranged from <10% in mos- tropical deforestation continues unabated. quitoes to >50% in ants and lizards, probably reflecting differ- ences in the proportion of strict forest endemics across groups. Given the results, one might question whether the loss of all In bats, richness reductions accelerated with forest loss/degrada- tropical forests by itself would cause the sixth mass extinction. tion, whereas biodiversity loss decelerated or increased linearly in I attempt to explore this question using simple back-of-envelope all other groups (except for trees, which showed a decelerating calculations. Barnosky et al. (17) defined a mass extinction event as and then accelerating trend, and mosquitoes, which increased in one having a similar magnitude (>75% biodiversity loss) or rate as richness at intermediate levels of forest loss/degradation). By con- the Big Five mass extinctions. Alroy (8) predicted greatest species ducting a simulation exercise in which all species were forest en- richness declines in ants (65.4%), lizards (51.1%), and dung beetles demics (i.e., 100% susceptible to forest loss/degradation), Alroy (44.7%), suggesting that in terms of absolute magnitude, tropical (8) demonstrates that groups comprising (uniformly) small-ranged forest loss by itself may not result in a mass extinction event as de- species produce decelerating curves, whereas groups with (uni- fined by Barnosky et al. (17). However, these estimates are likely too formly) large-ranged species display linear or accelerating trends low (8). First, in the simulations, primary forests were replaced largely of biodiversity loss. This finding is intuitive; however, factors such by relatively benign land uses (selectively logged forests, secondary as the shape and form of range size distributions for both forest forests, and forest fragments) rather than more destructive ones endemics and generalists may yet modify this finding. Future such as croplands, plantations, or pastures. Second, richness in de- studies can use the same simulation framework to explore such graded/deforested areas was likely overestimated due to incidental issues further. dispersal of species from primary forests and the persistence of In addition to presenting a new approach to estimate global species committed to extinction in degraded/deforested areas. species losses, Alroy (8) advances the literature on species rich- Third, estimated changes in overall species richness included ness estimation by introducing two new methods: λ5 richness es- nonprimary forest species gained from forest conversion. timator and multiton subsampling (MS). These methods were In terms of extinction rate, if we assume tropical primary − applied to allow fair comparison of biodiversity values in the boot- forest loss to proceed linearly at the current rate [74,532 km2·y 1 strapped primary forest versus the bootstrapped deforested/ for forests with >50% tree cover (3)], it will take just 225 y [from degraded forest samples. The λ5 estimator belongs to a class of year 2000, so as to coincide roughly with Alroy’s dataset (8)] for richness estimators that extrapolate a given observed community all primary forests to be altered or lost. Assuming conservatively sample to include species that are likely present in the habitat but that tropical primary forests only support two-thirds of the spe- not observed in the sample. Other estimators in this class that use cies (1) within each group, tropical forest loss/degradation will species abundance (versus presence/absence) data include the result in global richness declines of 43.8% (65.4% × 0.67) in ants, commonly used Chao1 (12) and abundance-based coverage 29.9% in dung beetles, and
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