How land use affects biodiversity: An analysis of the differences in the effects recorded on different continents

Abstract

Biodiversity provides humans with abundant natural resources, but due to human activities, land use has become one of the main factors determining the loss of biodiversity. Previous research has shown that land use has different effects on different species. To illustrate this phenomenon, this study used a wide range of sets of data to determine how land use affects species diversity worldwide, and whether this effect depends on the continent. This study mainly uses linear mixed-effects models (LMM) and generalized linear mixed-effects models (GLMM) to address the questions from two aspects: abundance and species richness. The results show that the responses of both abundance and species richness differ significantly between continents, which in Europe are significantly lower than in countries with primary vegetation. However, due to the sample size for Europe being much larger than that for Asia and Oceania, this result also indicates that the level of sampling could have biased the results.