Authors: Meyer, Carsten; Remelgado, Ruben;

Land use, climate change, and other pressures cause changes in different ecosystems’ extents, altering species’ habitats and survival. The IPBES Assessments reported globally and regionally declining extents of most (semi-)natural ecosystems, and the Post-2020 Framework seeks general increases in extents, with associated monitoring burdens. Yet, for most ecosystems and regions, systematic data on change direction and magnitude are lacking. Integrating three decades of environmental Earth observations (>50 satellite-based and in-situ datasets), we provide an unprecedentedly comprehensive record of global dynamics of land, freshwater, and coastal ecosystems over ~30 years. We find ecosystem extents to be highly dynamic. Artificial ecosystems like pastures, plantations, or mining areas increased substantially, mainly displacing sub-/tropical lowland moist forests. Yet, surprisingly, different (semi-)natural ecosystems’ global and regional extents did not decline systematically, exhibiting regional gains and losses and shifts between upward and downward trends, but no net loss on average. This paradox is explained by few, globally extensive and declining ecosystems making room for areal increases in many less extensive (semi-)natural ecosystems, notably many wetland types, as well as in artificial systems. Our results support ecosystem monitoring capacity in data-scarce regions, inform questions on sensible targets and baselines for Post-2020 monitoring, and enable diverse conservation applications.