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Biodiversity is a cornerstone of human health and well-being. However, while evidence of the contributions of nature to human health is rapidly building, research into how biodiversity relates to human health remains limited in important respects. In particular, a better mechanistic understanding of the range of pathways through which biodiversity can influence human health is needed. These pathways relate to both psychological and social processes as well as biophysical processes. Building on evidence from across the natural, social and health sciences, we present a conceptual framework organizing the pathways linking biodiversity to human health. Four domains of pathways—both beneficial as well as harmful—link biodiversity with human health: (i) reducing harm (e.g. provision of medicines, decreasing exposure to air and noise pollution); (ii) restoring capacities (e.g. attention restoration, stress reduction); (iii) building capacities (e.g. promoting physical activity, transcendent experiences); and (iv) causing harm (e.g. dangerous wildlife, zoonotic diseases, allergens). We discuss how to test components of the biodiversity-health framework with available analytical approaches and existing datasets. In a world with accelerating declines in biodiversity, profound land-use change, and an increase in non-communicable and zoonotic diseases globally, greater understanding of these pathways can reinforce biodiversity conservation as a strategy for the promotion of health for both people and nature. We conclude by identifying research avenues and recommendations for policy and practice to foster biodiversity-focused public health actions.
Establishing and maintaining protected areas (PAs) is a key action in delivering post-2020 biodiversity targets. PAs often need to meet multiple objectives, ranging from biodiversity protection to ecosystem service provision and climate change mitigation, but available land and conservation funding is limited. Therefore, optimizing resources by selecting the most beneficial PAs is vital. Here, we advocate for a flexible and transparent approach to selecting PAs based on multiple objectives, and illustrate this with a decision support tool on a global scale. The tool allows weighting and prioritization of different conservation objectives according to user-specified preferences as well as real-time comparison of the outcome. Applying the tool across 1,346 terrestrial PAs, we demonstrate that decision makers frequently face trade-offs among conflicting objectives, e.g., between species protection and ecosystem integrity. Nevertheless, we show that transparent decision support tools can reveal synergies and trade-offs associated with PA selection, thereby helping to illuminate and resolve land-use conflicts embedded in divergent societal and political demands and values.
Nature affects human well-being in multiple ways. However, the association between species diversity and human well-being at larger spatial scales remains largely unexplored. Here, we examine the relationship between species diversity and human well-being at the continental scale, while controlling for other known drivers of well-being. We related socio-economic data from more than 26,000 European citizens across 26 countries with macroecological data on species diversity and nature characteristics for Europe. Human well-being was measured as self-reported life-satisfaction and species diversity as the species richness of several taxonomic groups (e.g. birds, mammals and trees). Our results show that bird species richness is positively associated with life-satisfaction across Europe. We found a relatively strong relationship, indicating that the effect of bird species richness on life-satisfaction may be of similar magnitude to that of income. We discuss two, non-exclusive pathways for this relationship: the direct multisensory experience of birds, and beneficial landscape properties which promote both bird diversity and people's well-being. Based on these results, this study argues that management actions for the protection of birds and the landscapes that support them would benefit humans. We suggest that political and societal decision-making should consider the critical role of species diversity for human well-being.
Attitude polarization describes an increasing attitude difference between groups and is increasingly recognized as a multidimensional phenomenon. However, a unified framework to study polarization across multiple dimensions is lacking. We introduce the attitudinal space framework (ASF) to fully quantify attitudinal diversity. We highlight two key measures—attitudinal extremization and attitudinal dispersion—to quantify across- and within-group attitudinal patterns. First, we show that affective polarization in the US electorate is weaker than previously thought based on mean differences alone: in both Democrat and Republican partisans, attitudinal dispersion increased between 1988 and 2008. Second, we examined attitudes toward wolves in Germany. Despite attitude differences between regions with and without wolves, we did not find differences in attitudinal extremization or dispersion, suggesting only weak attitude polarization. These results illustrate how the ASF is applicable to a wide range of social systems and offers an important avenue to understanding societal transformations.
Nature benefits human health. To date, however, little is known whether biodiversity relates to human health. While some local and city level studies show that species diversity, as a measure of biodiversity, can have positive effects, there is a lack of studies about the relationship between different species diversity measures and human health, especially at larger spatial scales. Here, we conduct cross-sectional analyses of the association between species diversity and human health across Germany, while controlling for socio-economic factors and other nature characteristics. As indicators for human health, we use the mental (MCS) and physical health (PCS) component scales of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP, Short Form Health Questionnaire – SF12). For species diversity, we use species richness and abundance estimates of two species groups: plants and birds. We phrase the following hypotheses: plant and bird species are positively associated with mental and physical health (H1 & H3); bird abundance is positively related to mental health (H2). Our results demonstrate a significant positive relationship between plant and bird species richness and mental health across all model variations controlling for a multitude of other factors. These results highlight the importance for species diversity for people’s mental health and well-being. Therefore, policy makers, landscape planners and greenspace managers on the local and national level should consider supporting biodiverse environments to promote mental health and wellbeing. For this purpose, we propose to use species diversity measures as indicators for salutogenic (health promoting) characteristics of nature, landscape and urban green space.
Aim: The identification of the mechanisms determining spatial variation in biological diversity along elevational gradients is a central objective in ecology and biogeography. Here, we disentangle the direct and indirect effects of abiotic drivers (climatic conditions, and land use) and biotic drivers (vegetation structure and food resources) on functional diversity and composition of bird and bat assemblages along a tropical elevational gradient. Location: Southern slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, East Africa. Methods: We counted birds and recorded bat sonotypes on 58 plots distributed in near-natural and anthropogenically modified habitats from 700 to 4,600 m above sea level. For the recorded taxa, we compiled functional traits related to movement, foraging and body size from museum specimens and databases. Further, we recorded mean annual temperature, precipitation, vegetation complexity as well as the number of fruits, flowers, and insect biomass as measures of resource availability on each study site. Results: Using path analyses, we found similar responses of bird and bat functional diversity to the variation in abiotic and biotic drivers along the elevational gradient. In contrast, the functional composition of both taxa showed distinct responses to abiotic and biotic drivers. For both groups, direct temperature effects were most important, followed by resource availability, precipitation and vegetation complexity. Main Conclusions: Our findings indicate that physiological and metabolic constraints imposed by temperature and resource availability determine the functional diversity of bird and bat assemblages, whereas the composition of individual functional traits is driven by taxon-specific processes. Our study illustrates that distinct filtering mechanisms can result in similar patterns of functional diversity along broad environmental gradients. Such differences need to be taken into account when it comes to conserving the functional diversity of flying vertebrates on tropical mountains.
Nature's non-material contributions to people are difficult to quantify and one aspect in particular, nature's contributions to communication (NCC), has so far been neglected. Recent advances in automated language processing tools enable us to quantify diversity patterns underlying the distribution of plant and animal taxon labels in creative literature, which we term BiL (biodiversity in literature). We assume BiL to provide a proxy for people's openness to nature's non-material contributions enhancing our understanding of NCC. We assembled a comprehensive list of 240,000 English biological taxon labels. We pre-processed and searched a subcorpus of digitised literature on Project Gutenberg for these labels. We quantified changes in biodiversity indices commonly used in ecological studies for 16,000 books, encompassing 4,000 authors, as proxies for BiL between 1705 and 1969. We observed hump-shape patterns for taxon label richness, abundance and Shannon diversity indicating a peak of BiL in the middle of the 19th century. This is also true for the ratio of biological to general lexical richness. The variation in label use between different sections within books, quantified as β-diversity, declined until the 1830s and recovered little, indicating a less specialised use of taxon labels over time. This pattern corroborates our hypothesis that before the onset of industrialisation BiL may have increased, reflecting several concomitant influences such as the general broadening of literary content, improved education and possibly an intensified awareness of the starting loss of biodiversity during the period of romanticism. Given that these positive trends continued and that we do not find support for alternative processes reducing BiL, such as language streamlining, we suggest that this pronounced trend reversal and subsequent decline of BiL over more than 100 years may be the consequence of humans’ increasing alienation from nature owing to major societal changes in the wake of industrialisation. We conclude that our computational approach of analysing literary communication using biodiversity indices has a high potential for understanding aspects of non-material contributions of biodiversity to people. Our approach can be applied to other corpora and would benefit from additional metadata on taxa, works and authors.
Climatic niches describe the climatic conditions in which species can persist. Shifts in climatic niches have been observed to coincide with major climatic change, suggesting that species adapt to new conditions. We test the relationship between rates of climatic niche evolution and paleoclimatic conditions through time for 65 Old-World flycatcher species (Aves: Muscicapidae). We combine niche quantification for all species with dated phylogenies to infer past changes in the rates of niche evolution for temperature and precipitation niches. Paleoclimatic conditions were inferred independently using two datasets: a paleoelevation reconstruction and the mammal fossil record. We find changes in climatic niches through time, but no or weak support for a relationship between niche evolution rates and rates of paleoclimatic change for both temperature and precipitation niche and for both reconstruction methods. In contrast, the inferred relationship between climatic conditions and niche evolution rates depends on paleoclimatic reconstruction method: rates of temperature niche evolution are significantly negatively related to absolute temperatures inferred using the paleoelevation model but not those reconstructed from the fossil record. We suggest that paleoclimatic change might be a weak driver of climatic niche evolution in birds and highlight the need for greater integration of different paleoclimate reconstructions.
Mutualistic interactions between plants and animals can affect both plant and animal communities, and potentially leave imprints on plant demography. Yet, no study has simultaneously tested how trait variation in plant resources shapes the diversity of animal consumers, and how these interactions influence seedling recruitment. Here, we analyzed whether (i) phylogenetic diversity and functional diversity of fruiting plants were correlated with the corresponding diversity of frugivorous birds, and (ii) whether phylogenetic diversity and functional identity of plant and bird communities influenced the corresponding diversity and identity of seedling communities. We recorded mutualistic interactions between fleshy-fruited plants and frugivorous birds and seedling communities in 10 plots along an elevational gradient in the Colombian Andes. We built a phylogeny for plants/seedlings and birds and measured relevant morphological plant and bird traits that influence plant-bird interactions and seedling recruitment. We found that phylogenetic diversity and functional diversity of frugivorous birds were positively associated with the corresponding diversities of fruiting plants, consistent with a bottom-up effect of plants on birds. Moreover, the phylogenetic diversity of seedlings was related to the phylogenetic diversity of plants, but was unrelated to the phylogenetic diversity of frugivorous birds, suggesting that top-down effects of animals on seedlings were weak. Mean seed mass of seedling communities was positively associated with the mean fruit mass of plants, but was not associated with the mean avian body mass in the frugivore communities. Our study shows that variation in the traits of fleshy-fruited plants was associated with the diversity of frugivorous birds and affected the future trajectory of seedling recruitment, whereas the morphological traits of animal seed dispersers were unrelated to the phylogenetic and functional structure of seedling communities. These findings suggest that bottom-up effects are more important than top-down effects for seed-dispersal interactions and seedling recruitment in diverse tropical communities.
The species composition of local communities varies in space, and its similarity generally decreases with increasing geographic distance between communities, a phenomenon known as distance decay of similarity. It is, however, not known how changes in local species composition affect ecological processes, that is, whether they lead to differences in the local composition of species' functional roles. We studied eight seed‐dispersal networks along the South American Andes and compared them with regard to their species composition and their composition of functional roles. We tested (1) if changes in bird species composition lead to changes in the composition of bird functional roles, and (2) if the similarity in species composition and functional‐role composition decreased with increasing geographic distance between the networks. We also used cluster analysis to (3) identify bird species with similar roles across all networks based on the similarity in the plants they consume, (i) considering only the species identity of the plants and (ii) considering the functional traits of the plants. Despite strong changes in species composition, the networks along the Andes showed similar composition of functional roles. (1) Changes in species composition generally did not lead to changes in the composition of functional roles. (2) Similarity in species composition, but not functional‐role composition, decreased with increasing geographic distance between the networks. (3) The cluster analysis considering the functional traits of plants identified bird species with similar functional roles across all networks. The similarity in functional roles despite the high species turnover suggests that the ecological process of seed dispersal is organized similarly along the Andes, with similar functional roles fulfilled locally by different sets of species. The high species turnover, relative to functional turnover, also indicates that a large number of bird species are needed to maintain the seed‐dispersal process along the Andes.