Laura de Baan

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a guideline to build methods for land use impact assessment in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which is based on a number of assumptions: Discrete land use types are sufficient for an assessment of land use impacts; ecosystem quality remains constant over time of occupation; time and area of occupation are substitutable; transformation time is negligible; regeneration is linear and independent from land use history and landscape configuration; biodiversity and multiple ecosystem services are independent; the ecological impact is linearly increasing with the intervention; and there is no interaction between land use and other drivers

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an approach to quantify land use impacts on biodiversity across different world regions and highlight uncertainties and research needs, based on the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)/Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) land use assessment framework.

TL;DR: This work uses the Countryside species-area relationship (SAR) to quantify regional species loss due to land occupation and transformation for five taxa and six land use types in 804 terrestrial ecoregions and shows that the regions with highest biodiversity impacts differed markedly when the vulnerability of species was included.

TL;DR: There are serious conceptual shortcomings in the way models are constructed, with scale considerations largely absent, and there is a disproportionate focus on indicators that reflect changes in compositional aspects of biodiversity, mainly changes in species richness.

TL;DR: The impacts of land use on biodiversity varied strongly across ecoregions, showing the highest values in regions where most natural habitat had been converted in the past, and how it can be applied to prospective assessments using scenarios of future land use.