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

RESEARCH ARTICLE Assessing the effects of agricultural intensification on natural habitats and biodiversity in Southern Amazonia Jan Go¨ pelID*☯, Jan Schu¨ ngel‡, Benjamin Stuch‡, Ru¨ diger Schaldach☯ Center for Environmental Systems Research (CESR), University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. ‡ These authors also contributed equally to this work. * jan.goepel@usf.uni-kassel.de Abstract The ongoing trend toward agricultural intensification in Southern Amazonia makes it essen- tial to explore the future impacts of this development on the extent of natural habitats and biodiversity. This type of analysis requires information on future pathways of land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) under different socio-economic conditions and policy settings. For this purpose, the spatially explicit land-use change model LandSHIFT was applied to calculate a set of high-resolution land-use change scenarios for the Brazilian states Para and Mato Grosso. The period of the analysis were the years 2010–2030. The resulting land- use maps were combined with maps depicting vertebrate species diversity in order to exam- ine the impact of natural habitat loss on species ranges as well as the overall LULCC- induced effect on vertebrate diversity as expressed by the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII). The results of this study indicate a general decrease in biodiversity intactness in all investigated scenarios. However, agricultural intensification combined with diversified envi-

ronmental protection policies show least impact of LULCC on vertebrate species richness and conservation of natural habitats compared to scenarios with low agricultural intensifica- tion or scenarios with less effective conservation policies. 1. Introduction Human induced changes to the biosphere have caused severe losses of biodiversity [1, 2]. Important factors leading to a loss of natural habitats are land-use and land-cover changes (LULCC) in particular due to the expansion and intensification of agriculture [3]. Martinelli et al. [4] show that, the growth of Brazil’s agricultural sector from the 1970s until the end of the first decade of this century was an important driver of massive deforestation. During that period. an area of 18.8% of the original Brazilian Amazon biome, that is distin- guished as a biodiversity hotspot [5], has been cut down [6] and converted to a large extend to cropland and pasture posing a major threat to terrestrial biodiversity [7, 8]. Agriculture plays an important role in regard to Brazils GDP (6.1%) [9]. Even more important, a share of 39% of Brazils exported goods are agricultural commodities, and products [10]. This strong PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225914 November 25, 2020 1 / 21 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Go¨pel J, Schu¨ngel J, Stuch B, Schaldach R (2020) Assessing the effects of agricultural intensification on natural habitats and biodiversity in Southern Amazonia. PLoS ONE 15(11): e0225914. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0225914

Editor: Mirko Di Febbraro, University of Molise, Isernia, ITALY Received: November 15, 2019 Accepted: July 2, 2020 Published: November 25, 2020 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225914 Copyright: © 2020 Go¨pel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The data is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12014880. v1.