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Impacts of urban expansion on natural habitats in global drylands

Nature Sustainability volume 5, pages 869–878 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Urban regions across the world have expanded rapidly in recent decades, affecting fragile natural habitats, including in drylands, and threatening the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 15, ‘life on land’. Yet, few studies have comprehensively investigated impacts of urban expansion on natural dryland habitats globally even though these cover 40% of global land area and provide habitats for 28% of endangered species. Here, we quantify at multiple scales the loss of habitat quality directly and indirectly caused by dryland urban expansion. Direct impacts are conversions of natural habitats to urban land. We define indirect impacts as proximate impacts within 10 km around the expanded urban land footprint. We found that although urban expansion from 1992 to 2016 resulted in an average 0.8% loss of dryland habitat quality, the indirect impacts were 10–15 times greater. By considering the coincidence of habitat-quality loss and threatened species ranges, we found that, globally, nearly 60% of threatened species were affected by such indirect impacts of dryland urban expansion. Our findings suggest that strategic management is imperative to mitigate the substantial impacts of dryland urban expansion on biodiversity.

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Fig. 1: Patterns of natural habitats and dynamics of urban expansion in global drylands.
Fig. 2: Impacts of urban expansion on natural habitats from 1992 to 2016 at the global and biome scale.
Fig. 3: Impacts of urban expansion on natural habitats from 1992 to 2016 at the ecoregion scale.
Fig. 4: Direct and indirect impacts of urban expansion.
Fig. 5: Indirect impacts of urban expansion on threatened species.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed in this study are publicly available as referenced within the article. All data and scripts are also available from the corresponding author on request.

Code availability

Code used is available at https://github.com/Qiang-Ren/habitat-quality.git.

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Acknowledgements

We thank R. McDonald (The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA, USA) for his insightful comments, which have improved the quality of the manuscript. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41971270, 41971225 & 41801184) and the 111 project (BP0820003).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disasters, Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Qiang Ren & Chunyang He

  2. State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology (ESPRE), Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Qiang Ren, Chunyang He, Qingxu Huang & Peijun Shi

  3. Academy of Disaster Reduction and Emergency Management, Ministry of Emergency Management and Ministry of Education, Beijing, China

    Qiang Ren & Chunyang He

  4. Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Qiang Ren & Qingxu Huang

  5. Academy of Plateau Science and Sustainability, People’s Government of Qinghai Province and Beijing Normal University, Xining, China

    Chunyang He & Peijun Shi

  6. College of Geography and Ocean Sciences, Yanbian University, Yanji, China

    Da Zhang

  7. Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Burak Güneralp

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Contributions

C.H., Q.H. and Q.R. designed the study and planned the analysis. Q.R. performed the experiments and analysed the data. Q.R. and Q.H. drafted the manuscript. P.S., D.Z. and B.G. contributed to revising the manuscript. All authors contributed to the interpretation of findings, provided revisions to the manuscript and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Chunyang He.

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Ren, Q., He, C., Huang, Q. et al. Impacts of urban expansion on natural habitats in global drylands. Nat Sustain 5, 869–878 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00930-8

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