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Human appropriated net primary productivity as a metric for land use planning: a case study in the US Great Lakes region

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Abstract

Context

Human appropriation of net primary productivity (HANPP) is employed as a measure of human pressures on biodiversity, though largely at global and national scales rather than landscape to regional scales where many conservation decisions take place. Though gaining in familiarity, HANPP is not widely utilized by conservation professionals.

Objectives

This study, encompassing the US side of the Great Lakes basin, examines how regional distributions of HANPP relate to landscape-based biodiversity proxy metrics used by conservation professionals. Our objectives were (1) to quantify the HANPP of managed lands at the county scale; and (2) to assess spatial patterns of HANPP in comparison to landscape diversity and local habitat connectedness to determine if the metric can provide useful information to conservation professionals.

Methods

We aggregated forest and cropland NPP data between 2005 and 2015 and coupled it with previously published potential vegetation maps to quantify the HANPP of each county in the study region. We mapped the outputs at 500 m resolution to analyze spatial relationships between HANPP and landscape metrics of biodiversity potential.

Results

Area-weighted HANPP across our study region averaged 45% of NPP, down to 4.9% in forest-dominated counties. Greater HANPP correlated with reduced landscape diversity (p < 0.001, r2 = 0.28) and reduced local habitat connectedness (p < 0.001, r2 = 0.36).

Conclusion

HANPP could be used as an additional tool for conservation professionals during regional-scale land use planning or conservation decision-making, particularly in mixed-use landscapes that both support important biodiversity and have high levels of primary production harvest.

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Acknowledgements

Dr. Preeti Rao assisted with the collection and interpretation of forest harvest datasets. Shannon Brines assisted with GIS analysis. The School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan and The Nature Conservancy of Michigan provided partial support for this research. We gratefully acknowledge fellowship support provided to Erin Barton by the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and the Wyss Foundation’s Wyss Scholars Program.

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  1. Erin M. Barton

    Present address: USDA Forest Service, Santa Fe National Forest, 11 Forest Lane, Santa Fe, NM, 87508, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, 440 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Erin M. Barton, Douglas R. Pearsall & William S. Currie

  2. The Nature Conservancy, 101 E. César E. Chávez Ave., Lansing, MI, 48906, USA

    Douglas R. Pearsall

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Barton, E.M., Pearsall, D.R. & Currie, W.S. Human appropriated net primary productivity as a metric for land use planning: a case study in the US Great Lakes region. Landscape Ecol 35, 1323–1339 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-020-01017-5

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