Agricultural expansion is a major driver for loss of biodiversity; changes in land use or intensity associated with trade liberalisation can therefore have major consequences. Assessments of the impacts of agricultural trade have tended to neglect biodiversity, despite its crucial role in maintaining productive agro-ecosystems. Advice on assessment of biodiversity impacts is required to support...

It is increasingly recognized that human consumption leads to considerable losses of biodiversity. This study is the first to systematically quantify these losses in relation to land use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the production and consumption of (inter)nationally traded goods and services by presenting consumption-based biodiversity losses, in short biodiversity footpr...

Temporal baselines are needed for biodiversity, in order for the change in biodiversity to be measured over time, the targets for biodiversity conservation to be defined and conservation progress to be evaluated. Limited biodiversity information is widely recognized as a major barrier for identifying temporal baselines, although a comprehensive quantitative assessment of this is lacking. Here, ...

1. Introduction: context and scope of the study In the spirit of the growing environmental awareness in the past decades, we witness nowadays an increasing interest in biodiversity, both locally and worldwide. Biodiversity requires our attention for two reasons. First, it provides a wide range of benefits to mankind and human activities. Second, many human activities have contributed to unprece...

Hotspot analysis is the identification and ranking of countries or other geographic regions on the basis of biodiversity. Hotspots have exceptional biodiversity per unit land area. This paper introduces a new method of hotspot analysis that ranks hotspots on the basis of biodiversity and anthropogenic threats to biodiversity. These threats are represented by socioeconomic factors such as human ...

despite rapid growth of our knowledge on the phylum rotifera, only few studies on iranian rotifers have been carried out. in this paper, we present a checklist of rotifers from the province of tehran in iran. in total, 45 species of rotifers (class eurotatoria) are reported. most of the recorded species are cosmopolitan in distribution. cephalodella ventripes, dicranophorus forcipatus, d. luetk...

the land-locked country of afghanistan has a restricted but relatively diverse ichthyofauna comprising 85 species in 10 families. the fauna is dominated by cyprinidae (50 species) and other ostariophysans (28 species). eight species are endemics to afghanistan within its political boundaries. there are three principal drainage basins: the endorheic amu darya draining to the aral sea with 29 spe...

Recent reviews have argued that disease control is among the ecosystem services yielded by biodiversity. Lyme disease (LD) is commonly cited as the best example of the 'diluting' effect of biodiversity on disease transmission, but many studies document the opposite relationship, showing that human LD risk can increase with forestation. Here, we unify these divergent perspectives and find strong...

There is an urgent need to improve the evaluation of conservation interventions. This requires specifying an objective and a frame of reference from which to measure performance. Reference frames can be baselines (i.e., known biodiversity at a fixed point in history) or counterfactuals (i.e., a scenario that would have occurred without the intervention). Biodiversity offsets are interventions w...