The global human impact on biodiversity

Abstract Human activities drive a wide range of environmental pressures, including habitat change, pollution and climate change, resulting in unprecedented effects on biodiversity 1,2 . However, despite decades of research, generalizations on the dimensions and extent of human impacts on biodiversity remain ambiguous. Mixed views persist on the trajectory of biodiversity at the local scale 3 and even more so on the biotic homogenization of biodiversity across space 4,5 . We compiled 2,133 publications covering 97,783 impacted and reference sites, creating an unparallelled dataset of 3,667 independent comparisons of biodiversity impacts across all main organismal groups, habitats and the five most predominant…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• EG
  Ernst Göhner Stiftung
• GF
  Gesellschaft für Forschungsförderung Niederösterreich
• SN
  Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

  Award: 310030_197410
• UZ
  Universität Zürich