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A global assessment of the drivers of threatened terrestrial species richness

Howard, C.; Flather, C.H.; Stephens, P.A.

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Authors

C. Howard

C.H. Flather



Abstract

High numbers of threatened species might be expected to occur where overall species richness is also high; however, this explains only a proportion of the global variation in threatened species richness. Understanding why many areas have more or fewer threatened species than would be expected given their species richness, and whether that is consistent across taxa, is essential for identifying global conservation priorities. Here, we show that, after controlling for species richness, environmental factors, such as temperature and insularity, are typically more important than human impacts for explaining spatial variation in global threatened species richness. Human impacts, nevertheless, have an important role, with relationships varying between vertebrate groups and zoogeographic regions. Understanding this variation provides a framework for establishing global conservation priorities, identifying those regions where species are inherently more vulnerable to the effects of threatening human processes, and forecasting how threatened species might be distributed in a changing world.

Citation

Howard, C., Flather, C., & Stephens, P. (2020). A global assessment of the drivers of threatened terrestrial species richness. Nature Communications, 11, Article 993. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14771-6

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 28, 2020
Online Publication Date Feb 20, 2020
Publication Date 2020
Deposit Date Jan 10, 2020
Publicly Available Date Feb 26, 2020
Journal Nature Communications
Publisher Nature Research
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 11
Article Number 993
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14771-6

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





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