Main Pressures/Threats 2 Flashcards
What are the main categories of threats?
Use of lands and waters:
- Residential and commercial development
- Agriculture and aquaculture
- Energy production and mining
- Transportation, service and security corridors
Use/management of species and ecosystems:
- Biological resource use and control
- Human intrusions and disturbances
- Natural system management and modifications
Additional sources of stress:
- Invasive/ other problematic species, genes and pathogens
- Pollution
- Natural disasters
- Climate change
The main threats
Habitat loss/modifications
Overexploitation
Climate change
Pollution
Invasive species
Habitat loss/degradation
Over 75% of the worlds terrestrial surface shows significant impacts of people
This is a combination of very old and very new processes with very different spatial patterns across Earth
The human footprint
Combined different data sources from satellite remote sensed data and census data to build a composite layer of our footprint.
- Combines drivers and impact and sources
- Variable quality of data
Overexploitation and hunting
Overexploitation means harvesting species from the wild at rates faster than natural populations can recover.
Includes overfishing and overgrazing
Has global impacts
Types of pollution
Pesticides
Nutrients
Light
Particles/plastics
Noises
Pesticides
92 active ingredients
74.8 % of the global agricultural land is at risk of pesticide pollution with 31.4% falling within the “high-risk” class
Invasive species
For a large part of animal and plant species that have gone extinct, alien species were listed as one of the extinction drivers
Alien species ranked first as a driver of animal extinctions - ahead of the second-ranked driver “biological resource use (ex: hunting and harvesting)
What drives invasive species?
Roads
Airports
Ports/ships
Tourism
Where are invasive species a large problem?
Australia and New Zealand
Micronesia
Invasive species seems to be especially an island issue
