Biology subjects

Etard, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Etard, A..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Human development and inequality shape global threat patterns for terrestrial biodiversity

Biodiversity loss is driven by unsustainable human activities, yet the contextual conditions and underlying drivers of threats remain poorly understood. We assessed how protected areas, socioeconomic conditions, and biophysical factors explain global patterns of threat probabilities across six major threat types and four vertebrate taxa. We identified key explanatory variables and their associations with threats using Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Socioeconomic conditions, specifically human development and income inequality, were the strongest predictors. Their associations were complex and non-linear: notably, high human development index (HDI) was associated with both higher and lower threat probabilities, depending on inequality and regional context. Second, land cover and biophysical variables, such as shrubland cover, tree cover, and elevation range, explained additional, but taxon-specific variation. Finally, protected areas showed limited ability to explain threat patterns. By linking threat probabilities to their contextual and socioecological conditions, we aim to build a better understanding of the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Risk to European birds from collisions with wind-energy facilities

In line with Europes decarbonization goals, wind-power capacity is projected to increase in future years. However, wind-energy facilities can affect biodiversity; flying animals can fatally collide with wind-energy infrastructure. Here, we assessed the reported risk posed by collisions to 108 European birds, comparatively across species. We drew risk maps to assess current hotspots of risk. We employed a customised risk approach, considering that risk emerged from the interaction between (1) reported impacts (the total estimated number of fatalities at the species-level, accounting for current exposure to wind turbines) and (2) vulnerability to these impacts (the degree to which species may be affected by collision mortality). We used a quantitative synthesis of fatality numbers at wind-energy facilities to quantify collision-mortality rates at the species-level. We derived (1) by further combining these with information on species suitable areas and on current wind-turbine deployment. We estimated species vulnerability from ecological characteristics (generation length, clutch size, and estimates of European suitable area) assumed to reflect species ability to cope with disturbances. Overlapping vulnerability with estimated impacts, we classified species into different risk categories, considering species to be at higher relative risk when more vulnerable and more impacted. We assessed where species falling into the risk categories might occur, and where possible conflicts with wind-energy deployment might arise. We found several risk hotspots notably located in the Iberian Peninsula and Northern Europe. Our work helps inform wind-power deployment and spatial planning at the European scale with the aim of minimising negative biodiversity impacts.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Impacts of global food supply on biodiversity via land use and climate change

Land-use change is currently the greatest driver of biodiversity change, with climate change predicted to match or surpass its impacts by mid-century. The global food system is a key driver of both these anthropogenic pressures, thus the development of sustainable food systems will be critical to halting and reversing biodiversity loss. Previous studies of the biodiversity footprint of food tend to focus on land use alone. We use the multi-regional input-output model EXIOBASE to estimate the impacts of biodiversity embedded within the global food system. We build on prior analyses, calculating the impacts of both agricultural land-use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission footprints for the same two metrics of biodiversity: local species richness and rarity-weighted species richness. Our biodiversity models capture regional variation in the sensitivity of biodiversity both to land-use differences and to climate change. We find that the footprint of land area does not capture the biodiversity impact embedded within trade that is provided by our metric of land-driven species richness change, and that our metric of rarity-weighted richness places a greater emphasis on the biodiversity costs in Central and South America. We find that methane emissions are responsible for 70% of the overall GHG-driven biodiversity footprint and that, in several regions, emissions from a single years food production cause biodiversity loss equivalent to 2% or more of that regions total historic land use. The measures we present are simple to calculate and could be incorporated into decision making and environmental impact assessments by governments and businesses.

ecology↗