Abstract
Human threats to biodiversity are prevalent within protected areas (PAs), undermining their effectiveness in halting biodiversity loss. Certain threats tend to co-occur, resulting in amplified cumulative impact through synergistic effects. However, it remains unclear which threats are related the most. We analyzed a dataset of 71 human threats in 18 013 terrestrial PAs of the European Union's Natura 2000 network, using a Joint Species Distribution Modelling approach, to assess the threats' co-occurrence patterns and potential drivers. Overall, threats were more frequently correlated positively than negatively. Threats related to agriculture and urbanization were correlated strongly with most other threats. Approximately 70% of the variance in our model was explained by country-specific factors, indicating the importance of local drivers. Minimizing the negative impact of key threats can likely reduce the impact of related threats. However, more research is needed to understand better the relationships among threats and, importantly, their combined impact on biodiversity.
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Data availability
All data used in this study are publicly available. The aggregated dataset used to run the Joint Species Distribution Model is available in Figshare: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21594387.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all the researchers involved in the data collection process, making the datasets used in this study possible, as well as the EU for making them publicly available. Computational resources were supplied by the project "e-Infrastruktura CZ" (e-INFRA CZ LM2018140) supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic. We are thankful to four reviewers for their valuable comments.
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FM: Conceptualization, Data Curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization, Writing—original draft, Writing—review and editing. CK: Investigation, Visualization, Writing—review and editing. EG: Investigation, Visualization, Writing—review and editing. CM: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization, Writing—original draft, Writing—review and editing.
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Martini, F., Kounnamas, C., Goodale, E. et al. Examining the co-occurrences of human threats within terrestrial protected areas. Ambio 53, 592–603 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-023-01966-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-023-01966-6