Anil Madhavapeddy

LIFE metric published in Royal Society Phil Trans B / Jan 2025

After some years of hard work, our Mapping LIFE on Earth biodiversity metric was published today in a special issue of the Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B! The idea behind LIFE is that although human-driven habitat loss is known to be the greatest cause of the biodiversity crisis, we do not yet have robust spatially explicit metrics that quantify the relative impacts of human actions on species extinctions. And that's what LIFE provides: a way to compare the relative impacts of some landuse anywhere in the world, in a manner that is globally applicable.

There are lots of limitations in this first version: it does not yet cover plants (but we're working on it), and some other taxa such as freshwater (working on that too!), but it's a very solid start. We've uploaded the LIFE datasets to Zenodo, and the full pipeline source code is available too.

The release of LIFE is also discussed further in an article on Mongabay.

Noodling around with the team’s maps can reveal noticeable variations in the risk of extinction to various species in different regions, with implications for sourcing the goods we use every day. For example, clearing a hectare of forest in the Congo Basin will nudge far more species toward extinction than doing the same in northern Europe — the former is much more biodiverse than the latter. Companies could also use these maps to boost their sustainability by sourcing goods from places where extinctions are less likely. Or, individual consumers might use them to understand how their consumption choices affect species’ habitats. -- John Cannon

The Stockholm Environment Institute also covered it:

In a major step forward, the authors of this paper have expanded the potential applications of the "persistence score" approach to create LIFE: they have introduced high-performance computing and brought in data for over 30 000 vertebrate species. The tool can now create global maps of extinction risk probability for 30 875 species of terrestrial vertebrates at 1 arc-minute resolution (3.4 km2 at the equator).

The technical leap means that, for the first time, map users can access powerful quantitative data regarding the expected number of extinctions (whether that is an increase or decrease) caused by the conversion of natural vegetation to agriculture, or restoring farmland to natural habitat.

If you'd like to see a talk about LIFE, I discussed it in my recent LambdaDays keynote: