Biodiversity Intactness Index

The Biodiversity Intactness Index shows the modelled average abundance of originally-present species in a grid cell, as a percentage, relative to their abundance in an intact ecosystem. Originally available for year 2015, the data is now available in a time series covering the period 2000-2015 - here we provide a bi-decade subset of the index.

RCoE Action:

Biodiversity & Forest

Related SDGs and targets

Goal 15

Topics

Natural Resources Biodiversity & Wildlife Forests Protected Areas & Ecological Networks

Data provider

UNEP-WCMC, University College London, Natural History Museum, Imperial College London, CSIRO Canberra, Luc Hoffmann Institute, University of Copenhagen, University of Sussex

Suggested citation

Tim Newbold; Lawrence Hudson; Andy Arnell; Sara Contu et al. (2016). Dataset: Global map of the Biodiversity Intactness Index, from Newbold et al. (2016) Science. Resource: Map of Biodiversity Intactness Index. Natural History Museum Data Portal (data.nhm.ac.uk). https://doi.org/10.5519/0009936

Related tool or portal

Licence

No information provided

Date or time period of observation

2016

Frequency of update

Annual

Geographic coverage

Africa

Cautions

The models suggested a generally smaller impact of land use on the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) than that found in a previous study. The latter model may have overestimated the BII by ignoring lagged responses and using sites that often have experienced some human impact as baselines. The density of sampling is inevitably uneven; biomes that are particularly underrepresented, including boreal forests, tundra, flooded grasslands, and savannas and mangroves, produce fewer confidence results. The data is likely to underrepresent soil and canopy species.

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