Based on an extensive model intercomparison, we assessed trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services from historical reconstructions and future scenarios of land-use and climate change. During the 20th century, biodiversity declined globally by 2 to 11%, as estimated by a range of indicators. Provisioning ecosystem services increased several fold, and regulating services decreased moderately. Going forward, policies toward sustainability have the potential to slow biodiversity loss resulting from land-use change and the demand for provisioning services while reducing or reversing declines in regulating services. However, negative impacts on biodiversity due to climate change appear poised to increase, particularly in the higher-emissions scenarios. Our assessment identifies remaining modeling uncertainties but also robustly shows that renewed policy efforts are needed to meet the goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Detailed large-scale information on mammal distribution has often been lacking, hindering conservation efforts. We used the information from the 2009 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as a baseline for developing habitat suitability models for 5027 out of 5330 known terrestrial mammal species, based on their habitat relationships. We focused on the following environmental variables: land cover, elevation and hydrological features. Models were developed at 300 m resolution and limited to within species' known geographical ranges. A subset of the models was validated using points of known species occurrence. We conducted a global, fine-scale analysis of patterns of species richness. The richness of mammal species estimated by the overlap of their suitable habitat is on average one-third less than that estimated by the overlap of their geographical ranges. The highest absolute difference is found in tropical and subtropical regions in South America, Africa and Southeast Asia that are not covered by dense forest. The proportion of suitable habitat within mammal geographical ranges correlates with the IUCN Red List category to which they have been assigned, decreasing monotonically from Least Concern to Endangered. These results demonstrate the importance of fine-resolution distribution data for the development of global conservation strategies for mammals.

Generation length (GL) is defined as the average age of parents of the current cohort, reflecting the turnover rate of breeding individuals in a population. GL

To address the ongoing global biodiversity crisis, governments have set strategic objectives and have adopted indicators to monitor progress toward their achievement. Projecting the likely impacts on biodiversity of different policy decisions allows decision makers to understand if and how these targets can be met. We projected trends in two widely used indicators of population abundance Geometric Mean Abundance, equivalent to the Living Planet Index and extinction risk (the Red List Index) under different climate and land‐use change scenarios. Testing these on terrestrial carnivore and ungulate species, we found that both indicators decline steadily, and by 2050, under a Business‐as‐usual (BAU) scenario, geometric mean population abundance declines by 18–35% while extinction risk increases for 8–23% of the species, depending on assumptions about species responses to climate change. BAU will therefore fail Convention on Biological Diversity target 12 of improving the conservation status of known threatened species. An alternative sustainable development scenario reduces both extinction risk and population losses compared with BAU and could lead to population increases. Our approach to model species responses to global changes brings the focus of scenarios directly to the species level, thus taking into account an additional dimension of biodiversity and paving the way for including stronger ecological foundations into future biodiversity scenario assessments.

Spatial data on species distributions are available in two main forms, point locations and distribution maps (polygon ranges and grids). The first are often temporally and spatially biased, and too discontinuous, to be useful (untransformed) in spatial analyses. A variety of modelling approaches are used to transform point locations into maps. We discuss the attributes that point location data and distribution maps must satisfy in order to be useful in conservation planning. We recommend that before point location data are used to produce and/or evaluate distribution models, the dataset should be assessed under a set of criteria, including sample size, age of data, environmental/geographical coverage, independence, accuracy, time relevance and (often forgotten) representation of areas of permanent and natural presence of the species. Distribution maps must satisfy additional attributes if used for conservation analyses and strategies, including minimizing commission and omission errors, credibility of the source/assessors and availability for public screening. We review currently available databases for mammals globally and show that they are highly variable in complying with these attributes. The heterogeneity and weakness of spatial data seriously constrain their utility to global and also sub-global scale conservation analyses.