Authors: Kastner, Thomas; Bidoglio, Giorgio;Dullinger, Stefan;Erb, Karl-Heinz;Essl, Franz;Krausmann, Fridolin;Matej, Sarah;Semenchuk, Philipp;

It is becoming increasingly clear that achieving conservation targets will require transformative changes in the way societies operate. Part of such changes revolve around consumption patterns. Indicators depicting biodiversity implications of individual products can be a useful tool to assess the impacts of consumption choices. The multi-facetted nature of biodiversity poses a challenge to developing such indicators and communicating insights derived from them. Here we present a novel set of indicators, depicting how agricultural production – through land use and its intensity – impacts terrestrial vertebrate biodiversity. For this, we combine global data on land use, agricultural production and species distributions with a countryside species-area relationship model. We developed two spatially explicit indicators for the contribution of individual agricultural products to: (a) regional decline in species richness at the landscape level, and (b) global biodiversity decline, via accounting for the share of species ranges affected by the respective land use in a given landscape. Our results show that the different indicators yield complementing, often contrasting, insights on the biodiversity implications of agricultural products. Presenting the results for selected individual products and production areas highlights how these indicators help assessing the effect of altered consumption choices on biodiversity across different scales.