The terrestrial biodiversity model in WISE assesses representativeness of native ecosystems. It uses information on land environments (a surrogate for ecosystems), legally protected areas and native land cover to identify ‘threatened environments’ as a result of land use change using five threat categories.
The figures below show the change from 2006 to 2050 in the extent and type of ‘threatened environments’ in the Waikato region running a baseline (‘business as usual’) land use change simulation. The centre figure shows changes for all the five 'threatened environment' categories, while the comparision map (right hand graph) focuses on the 'acutely threatened' category only showing in blue the extent and locations of all the new areas that have become acutely threatened by 2050 compared to those areas in that are ‘acutely threatened’ in both 2006 and 2050 (in green).
Source of Terrestrial Biodiversity model: Landcare Research NZ Ltd. (2009)
