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Science 10 March 2000:
Vol. 287. no. 5459, pp. 1770 - 1774
DOI: 10.1126/science.287.5459.1770
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Review

Global Biodiversity Scenarios for the Year 2100 

Osvaldo E. Sala, 1* F. Stuart Chapin , III, 2 Juan J. Armesto, 4 Eric Berlow, 5 Janine Bloomfield, 6 Rodolfo Dirzo, 7 Elisabeth Huber-Sanwald, 8 Laura F. Huenneke, 9 Robert B. Jackson, 10 Ann Kinzig, 11 Rik Leemans, 12 David M. Lodge, 13 Harold A. Mooney, 14 Martín Oesterheld, 1 N. LeRoy Poff, 15 Martin T. Sykes, 17 Brian H. Walker, 18 Marilyn Walker, 3 Diana H. Wall 16

Scenarios of changes in biodiversity for the year 2100 can now be developed based on scenarios of changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, climate, vegetation, and land use and the known sensitivity of biodiversity to these changes. This study identified a ranking of the importance of drivers of change, a ranking of the biomes with respect to expected changes, and the major sources of uncertainties. For terrestrial ecosystems, land-use change probably will have the largest effect, followed by climate change, nitrogen deposition, biotic exchange, and elevated carbon dioxide concentration. For freshwater ecosystems, biotic exchange is much more important. Mediterranean climate and grassland ecosystems likely will experience the greatest proportional change in biodiversity because of the substantial influence of all drivers of biodiversity change. Northern temperate ecosystems are estimated to experience the least biodiversity change because major land-use change has already occurred. Plausible changes in biodiversity in other biomes depend on interactions among the causes of biodiversity change. These interactions represent one of the largest uncertainties in projections of future biodiversity change.

1 Department of Ecology and Instituto de Investigaciones Fisiológicas y Ecológicas vinculadas a la Agricultura, Faculty of Agronomy, University of Buenos Aires, Avenida San Martín 4453, Buenos Aires 1417, Argentina.
2 Institute of Arctic Biology,
3 Institute of Northern Forest Cooperative Research, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK 99775, USA.
4 Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Chile, Casilla 653, Santiago, Chile.
5 Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
6 Environmental Defense Fund, 257 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA.
7 Instituto de Ecología, UNAM, México 04510, México.
8 Lehrstuhl fur Grunlandlehre, Technische Universitat Munchen, D85350, Germany.
9 Department of Biology, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA.
10 Department of Botany, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
11 Department of Biology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA.
12 National Institute for Public Health & the Environment, Bilthoven, Netherlands.
13 Department of Biology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556-0369 USA.
14 Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
15 Department of Biology and
16 Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA.
17 Ekologihuset, Lund University, 22362 Lund, Sweden.
18 Division of Wildlife and Ecology, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Canberra, Australia.
*   To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: sala{at}ifeva.edu.ar

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