By Abbas Nazil
Farming has caused more than a 26 per cent decline in species richness within the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems, placing thousands of unique plants and animals at growing risk of extinction, according to a fresh global study.
The research shows that agricultural expansion is rapidly transforming biodiversity hotspots, regions already heavily degraded and critical for global conservation, where many species exist nowhere else on Earth.
Published on December 26, 2025, in the journal, Communications Earth and Environment, the study was led by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China Agricultural University, with contributions from researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States.
The authors warned that conservation efforts must urgently prioritise biodiversity hotspots, as these areas are experiencing some of the fastest and most damaging agricultural pressures worldwide.
Biodiversity hotspots are defined as regions with exceptionally high concentrations of endemic species that have already lost more than 70 per cent of their original natural vegetation.
As a result, much of the planet’s unique wildlife is now confined to small, fragmented habitats that are increasingly surrounded by farms.
The study focused on small-ranged vertebrates such as mammals, birds and amphibians that occupy very limited geographic areas and are highly sensitive to habitat loss.
Even minor land conversion, the researchers noted, can lead to the collapse of entire populations of these species.
Using data from the global PREDICTS biodiversity database, the team compared natural habitats with farmland across hotspots worldwide.
They found that croplands inside biodiversity hotspots supported 26 per cent fewer species than natural ecosystems, along with 12 per cent fewer individual animals and plants.
Overall ecological diversity was also reduced by nearly 9 per cent in converted areas.
Satellite data further revealed that cropland within biodiversity hotspots expanded by 12 per cent between 2000 and 2019, outpacing the global average expansion rate.
This growth was most pronounced in tropical and developing regions, including the Atlantic Forest and Cerrado in South America, Indo-Burma and Sundaland in Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa.
By mapping cropland expansion against the distribution of small-ranged vertebrates, the researchers identified 3,483 high-risk zones covering about 1.74 billion hectares.
Alarmingly, nearly 1.03 billion hectares of these high-risk areas lie outside protected reserves, leaving them highly vulnerable to further agricultural conversion.
Among the regions facing the greatest threat are the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka, Indo-Burma, Sundaland, the Atlantic Forest and the Eastern Himalaya.
In India’s Western Ghats, experts report that land-use change is accelerating, with forests increasingly replaced by orchards and plantations encouraged by subsidies.
This form of agricultural expansion fragments habitats into isolated patches, making survival and movement difficult for wildlife in a region home to thousands of plant species and hundreds of animals, many globally threatened.
The study concluded that simply expanding farmland to meet rising food demand is unsustainable in biodiversity hotspots.
Instead, the authors called for strategic expansion of protected areas, improved farm productivity on existing land, stronger international cooperation on food trade and greater involvement of local communities in conservation.
