Exploring the spatial relationship between carbon storage and
biodiversity: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Abstract
Climate change and biodiversity loss are severe and intertwined global
threats. Land-based efforts to address both require an understanding of
the spatial relationships between carbon storage and biodiversity. Here,
we present a systematic review and meta-analysis of the strength of
these spatial relationships across the literature. We synthesize the
estimated spatial correlations and infer how different factors (spatial
scale, metrics, biome, human pressure) impact these strengths using
linear mixed-effect models. Our results show that spatial scale is a
significant factor, and the combination of metrics used to express
carbon storage and biodiversity plays a more important role. While
relationships are moderately positive across all conditions, the
strength of the relationships decreases significantly from global to
local scales. We find large variations in the strength for different
metrics, across different biomes, and in the presence or absence of
human pressure. We find a stronger relationship in natural rather than
human-dominated landscapes for temperate forests, grasslands and
deserts, but the opposite for tropical and subtropical forests.
Ecosystem-level biodiversity proxies (habitat quality) show strong
relationships to the total carbon pool, while taxonomic metrics (species
richness) show a weaker relationship. The largest negative relationship
is between total carbon and flora & fauna species richness. Our results
suggest different synergies for different dimensions of carbon storage
and biodiversity and shed light on where further effort is needed.