Submitted by Anil Madhavapeddy on Thu, 09/01/2025 - 15:20
Our work on LIFE (a metric for mapping the impact of land-cover change on global extinctions) is now available in the proceedings of the Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B. As with all of our outputs, the code and datasets are available under liberal licenses (within the bounds of the restrictions imposed on us by the datasets we used to construct the metric).
The release of LIFE is also discussed further in an article on Mongabay:
Noodling around with the team’s maps can reveal noticeable variations in the risk of extinction to various species in different regions, with implications for sourcing the goods we use every day. For example, clearing a hectare of forest in the Congo Basin will nudge far more species toward extinction than doing the same in northern Europe — the former is much more biodiverse than the latter. Companies could also use these maps to boost their sustainability by sourcing goods from places where extinctions are less likely. Or, individual consumers might use them to understand how their consumption choices affect species’ habitats.-- John Cannon
The Stockholm Environment Institute also covered it:
In a major step forward, the authors of this paper have expanded the potential applications of the "persistence score" approach to create LIFE: they have introduced high-performance computing and brought in data for over 30 000 vertebrate species. The tool can now create global maps of extinction risk probability for 30 875 species of terrestrial vertebrates at 1 arc-minute resolution (3.4 km2 at the equator).
The technical leap means that, for the first time, map users can access powerful quantitative data regarding the expected number of extinctions (whether that is an increase or decrease) caused by the conversion of natural vegetation to agriculture, or restoring farmland to natural habitat.
We look forward to working with users of LIFE towards actionable impacts on conservation. Please do get in touch with any of the authors if you wish to discuss further.
