Unveiling human impacts on global Key Biodiversity Areas: Assessing disturbance and fragmentation to inform conservation strategies

Abstract

Effective preservation of Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) is crucial to address biodiversity loss. Human-induced disturbance in these vital sites can exacerbate species extinction and challenge the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). This study delves into the human disturbance and protection in terrestrial KBAs worldwide, focusing particularly on habitat fragmentation to devise tailored conservation strategies. Our results reveal widespread human disturbance across global KBAs, with an average Human Footprint Index of 12.3 and a disturbance rate of 62 %. Only one-fifth of KBAs are fully safeguarded by protected areas, and a significant portion remains unprotected, with even many highly protected sites under severe disturbance. Globally, human activities have led to substantial implicit habitat fragmentation in KBAs, resulting in a 70 % average decline in habitat size, with less than half of KBAs maintaining well-connected active habitats. These findings inform the classification of KBAs for priority conservation, with 80 % requiring both intensity regulation and spatial planning of human activities. Higher levels of human disturbance do not necessarily lead to more severe fragmentation, underscoring the potential for relocating or planning human activities to mitigate fragmentation. This research serves as a foundational assessment of human impacts on KBAs, providing a basis for KBA management and global conservation efforts to meet GBF goals.

Keywords

Biodiversity conservation / Human footprint / Habitat size / Habitat connectivity / Conservation strategy

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Runjia Yang: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Software, Resources, Methodology, Conceptualization. Xinyu Dong: Software, Methodology. Suchen Xu: Visualization, Software. Xiaoya Li: Writing – original draft, Visualization. Kechao Wang: Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization. Yanmei Ye: Supervision, Methodology, Funding acquisition. Wu Xiao: Supervision, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper

Acknowledgements

The research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program (Grant No. 2023YFE0122300), the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 2024JJ8351), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. S20230127).

Data availability

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on request.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.100259.

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