Assessing the effects of agricultural intensification on natural habitats and biodiversity in Southern Amazonia

The ongoing trend toward agricultural intensification in Latin America makes it essential to explore intensification measures in combination with assumptions regarding future socio-economic development and policies to protect biodiversity and natural habitats. The spatially explicit land-use change model LandSHIFT was applied to calculate a set of high-resolution land-use change scenarios for Southern Amazonia. LandSHIFT was chosen for this purpose, as it is able to simulate the future development of land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) under the combination of various driving factors operating at different spatial scale-levels, e.g., local land-use policy and global demands for agricultural commodities. The period of the analysis is 2010 - 2030. The resulting maps were analyzed in combination with spatially explicit maps depicting vertebrate species diversity in order to examine the effect of a loss of natural habitats on species ranges as well as the overall LULCC-induced effect on vertebrate diversity as expressed by the Biodiversity Intactness Index in this region. The results of this study indicate a general decrease in Biodiversity Intactness in all investigated scenarios. However, agricultural intensification combined with diversified environmental protection policies show least negative impact of LULCC on vertebrate species richness and intactness of natural habitats compared to scenarios with low agricultural intensification or scenarios with less effective conservation policies. Finally, we are able to demonstrate the ability of the spatially explicit land-use change model to simulate the process of agricultural intensification and analyze its effects on natural habitats in the form of habitat loss and ecosystem degradation, allowing for analyzes of ecosystem health and functioning.