MSA Degradation

Source: GLOBIO 4 (PBL) Year: 2015 Category: Scenario Format: Raster grid (COG), native 10″ (~300 m) Used in risk analysis: Yes. It is the present-day level of the Species asset in Resilience, read as a degradation. It is not a Sites & territories materiality flag.

What it shows

This layer shows how degraded species abundance was in 2015, as a percentage. The layer is a state: it says where a place stands today. The MSA shock layers say how it moves by 2035, 2050 or 2080.

Resilience reads it as the level of the Species asset. Through Species it enters every nature risk that Species supplies, for example Loss of biological control, Loss of air filtration, Loss of noise attenuation, Loss of biomass provisioning, Loss of recreation services and Loss of soil quality regulation.

How it is built

The degradation is D = 1 − MSA, in percent, for 2015. MSA, the Mean Species Abundance of GLOBIO 4, compares the abundance of native species with an undisturbed state.

The layer is deliberately not tagged as a shock layer. Tagging it would make it compete with the MSA shock layers for the Species asset.

How to read it

0 % would be intact land and 100 % a fully degraded one. Two caveats matter:

• No cell reads 0 %. GLOBIO applies a climate pressure to every cell, so the least disturbed land reads about 8 %. That is a real climate-driven degradation.
• Deserts read high. GLOBIO classes deserts as rangeland, so an empty desert reads about 72 %.

Source

GLOBIO 4 (PBL), Schipper et al. (2020). Licensed CC BY 4.0.

Related pages: MSA shock (SSP1-2.6), MSA shock (SSP5-8.5), Shock layers.

Legend

Symbolised field: MSA degradation (%)

Generated from darwin/layers/layer-msa-degradation-2015.toml (develop).