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Biodiversity Intactness Index

The Biodiversity Intactness Index shows the modelled average abundance of originally-present species in a grid cell, as a percentage, relative to their abundance in an intact ecosystem. Originally available for year 2015, the data is now available in a time series covering the period 2000-2015 - here we provide a bi-decade subset of the index.

Tim Newbold; Lawrence Hudson; Andy Arnell; Sara Contu et al. (2016). Dataset: Global map of the Biodiversity Intactness Index, from Newbold et al. (2016) Science. Resource: Map of Biodiversity Intactness Index. Natural History Museum Data Portal (data.nhm.ac.uk). https://doi.org/10.5519/0009936

2016

The models suggested a generally smaller impact of land use on the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) than that found in a previous study. The latter model may have overestimated the BII by ignoring lagged responses and using sites that often have experienced some human impact as baselines. The density of sampling is inevitably uneven; biomes that are particularly underrepresented, including boreal forests, tundra, flooded grasslands, and savannas and mangroves, produce fewer confidence results. The data is likely to underrepresent soil and canopy species.


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