We here respond to Nunez et al. (Reg Environ Chang 20:39, 2020), recently published in Regional Environmental Change. Nunez et al. project biodiversity responses to land-use and climate change in Central Asia. Their projections are based on scenarios of changing socio-economic and environmental conditions for the years 2040, 2070, and 2100. We suggest that the predicted magnitude of biodiversity loss might be biased high, due to four shortfalls in the data used and the methods employed. These are (i) the use of an inadequate measure of “biodiversity intactness,” (ii) a failure to acknowledge for large spatial variation in land-use trends across the five considered Central Asian countries, (iii) the assumption of a strictly linear, negative relationship between livestock grazing intensity and the abundance of animals and plants, and (iv) the extrapolation of grazing-related biodiversity responses into areas of cropland. We conclude that future scenarios of biodiversity response to regional environmental change in Central Asia will benefit from using regional, not global, spatial data on livestock distribution and land-use patterns. The use of extra-regional data on the relationships between biodiversity and land-use or climate should be avoided.

中文翻译：

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在中亚实现更有意义的生物多样性对土地利用变化的反应的方案

我们在这里回应Nunez等。（Reg Environ Chang 20:39，2020），最近发表在《区域环境变化》中。Nunez等。项目对中亚土地利用和气候变化的生物多样性反应。他们的预测是基于2040、2070和2100年社会经济和环境状况不断变化的情景。我们建议，由于所使用的数据和所采用的方法存在四个不足，生物多样性丧失的预测规模可能会偏高。这些是（i）对“生物多样性完整性”的使用不足，（ii）没有考虑到五个被考虑的中亚国家土地利用趋势的巨大空间变化，（iii）严格线性假设，放牧强度与动植物数量之间的负相关关系，以及（iv）将与放牧相关的生物多样性反应外推到农田中。我们得出结论，未来生物多样性对中亚区域环境变化的反应将受益于使用关于牲畜分布和土地利用方式的区域性而非全球性空间数据。应避免使用关于生物多样性与土地利用或气候之间关系的区域外数据。