Population policies, programmes and the environment

Human consumption is depleting the Earth's natural resources and impairing the capacity of life-supporting ecosystems. Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively over the past 50 years than during any other period, primarily to meet increasing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel. Such consumption, together with world population increasing from 2.6 billion in 1950 to 6.8 billion in 2009, are major contributors to environmental damage. Strengthening family-planning services is crucial to slowing population growth, now 78 million annually, and limiting population size to 9.2 billion by 2050. Otherwise, birth rates could remain unchanged, and world population would grow to 11 billion. Of particular concern are the 80 million annual pregnancies (38% of all pregnancies) that are unintended. More than 200 million women in developing countries prefer to delay their pregnancy, or stop bearing children altogether, but rely on traditional, less-effective methods of contraception or use no method because they lack access or face other barriers to using contraception. Family-planning programmes have a successful track record of reducing unintended pregnancies, thereby slowing population growth. An estimated $15 billion per year is needed for family-planning programmes in developing countries and donors should provide at least$5 billion of the total, however, current donor assistance is less than a quarter of this funding target

Alien Futures Horizon Scanning dataset

The data are the result of the Alien Futures Horizon Scanning project.  They were collected through an open online survey  (EnglishSurveyFinal.pdf) to poll specialists and stakeholders from around the world as to their opinion on the three most important issues that may affect the future global and local management of biological invasions in the next 20 to 50 years both globally and at their respective local working level. The dataset also contains the categorisation of these issues into topics conducted by the Alien Futures team and presented in: Dehnen-Schmutz, K., Boivin, T., Essl, F., Groom, Q. J., Harrison, L., Touza, J. M., Bayliss, H. (2018): Alien Futures: what is on the horizon for biological invasions?. Diversity & Distributions DOI:10.1111/ddi.12755

Looking for local adaptation: convergent microevolution in Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis).

SNP dataset in Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis) published in Genes 2019, 10(9), 673; https://doi.org/10.3390/genes1009067

Processed Data for Figures of "Declining Amazon biomass due to deforestation and subsequent degradation losses exceeding gains"

Processed output data for generating figures of "Declining Amazon biomass due to deforestation and subsequent degradation losses exceeding gains". Most datasets are aggregated to 0.25 degree resolution of L-VOD data. Data are organised in folders but should be added to a single directory for easy use with provided code. AGC_LVOD: Aboveground carbon [Mg C ha] (2011-2019) and trends [Mg C ha yr] derived from different L-VOD indices calibrated to AGC using the ESA CCI biomass map. Provides data based on smoothed, max and trend indices as well as their mean.modelprocesschanges: Annual and total aboveground carbon changes [Mg C ha] (2011-2018) derived for different processes following methods described in the manuscript.inputData: pre-processed landcover fraction information at 1 km resolution, used as input for Figure 1b.forestcover: Forest cover and intact (old-growth) forest cover fractions derived from mapbiomas. (2011-2018)masks: Raster mask of areas considered in analysis.valuerangeserrors: Upper and lower value boundaries for AGC and processes, derived from standard errors in ESA CCI biomass map. When using any of the data listed above please cite the original paper (Fawcett et al., 2022) as well as the original data sources mentioned in the manuscript