Genetic diversity loss by country

Cite as: Expósito-Alonso, M. (2026). Genetic diversity loss by country, v0.0.1 (alpha). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23679299 (this DOI always resolves to the latest version).

A report by Moisés Expósito-Alonso (University of California Berkeley; Innovative Genomics Institute; Howard Hughes Medical Institute): a model-based estimate, for every country, of how much genetic diversity the mapped plants, mammals, amphibians and reptiles have lost since 1850 as their primary habitat was converted. Live page: https://genetic-diversity-report.github.io/ (an independent research product; not a CBD document).

Every value is a model-based estimate. It is modelled from global datasets, not national data, and has not been validated by any Party. It is not the headline indicator A.4 and is not a substitute for it; it is intended to be read alongside it and the complementary indicator on populations maintained. Country values are not an ordering of countries: species coverage, priors and range data differ by country, so a value is read with its species count and confidence, never as a rank.

Current run

run id	20261024-r3
methods version	0.1.2
built (UTC)	2026-10-26
countries in scope	210 (every country with LUH2 land)
species	49,287 plants, mammals, amphibians and reptiles with a range map reaching the 210 countries; 48,064 enter the run's loss table, in 186,218 species × country pairs (the bundle carries the default-key subsets of that table)
estimates at the default keys	169 countries on primary habitat, 27 more under the natural-habitat definition, 14 without an area estimate

Birds are not included. The land-use record ends in 2015. The interval around each value covers exponent uncertainty and species sampling only.

What is in this repository

path	content
index.html	the page (static; loads data/ by relative path, routes with URL hashes)
methods_panel.md	the methods and provenance text shown inside the page
data/bundle_manifest.json	every file of the bundle with its size and hash, the run id, the scope, the provenance-id rule, the source tables
data/country_summary_default.json	the default-key values for all countries (home map, search, compare)
data/country/<ISO3>.json	one compact file per country: area and protection lenses by biome and taxon, 1850 and 1970 baselines
data/country_summary/<ISO3>/, data/species/<ISO3>/	full tables, including per-species rows, for Armenia, Spain, Brazil, Kenya, the United States and the pooled unit
data/country_protection_area.json	protected-area shares per country and biome, from the public WDPA and WD-OECM
dashboard.html	a single-file offline copy of the page with the same data (38 MB)
data/redlist/<ISO3>.json	the Red List breakdown of each country's time series (categories with at least 5 species; listed in bundle_manifest.json under redlist_files)
data/gbf/gbf_indicators.json	country aggregates of the nine-country GBF genetic-indicator pilot (Mastretta-Yanes et al. 2024; observed assessments, not model output; the page's "GBF indicator" lenses; listed in bundle_manifest.json under gbf_files)
assets/	figure files of the letter (CC BY-NC 4.0 with the data, see DATA_LICENSE.md)

Numbers are produced by the author's pipeline (cop17-2026/, to be published separately); this repository holds the built page and its data only. Each run is one commit, so earlier runs stay in the history. An archived copy of the full result tables with a DOI is planned.

Verifying a number

Every displayed value carries a provenance id. bundle_manifest.json gives the rule by which the id is formed from the run id, the table and the keys, so a value on the page can be traced to its row in data/ and to the estimator described in methods_panel.md.

Sources

LUH2 v2h land-use reconstruction (850–2015) · Natural Earth admin-0 v5.1.1 · RESOLVE Ecoregions 2017 · WDPA and WD-OECM (September 2026 release; public polygons only, none redistributed) · IUCN Red List assessments 2025-2 and IUCN spatial data 2022-1 (mammals, amphibians, reptiles; range maps are used in the computation and not redistributed) · Borgelt et al. 2022 plant ranges · Living Planet Index 2024 (derived summaries only) · diversity–area exponents from Schmidt et al. 2026, Mualim et al. 2026, RepAdapt and Expósito-Alonso et al. 2022 · Mastretta-Yanes et al. 2024 pilot.

Protected areas: UNEP-WCMC and IUCN (2026). Protected Planet: The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) and World Database on Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (WD-OECM), September 2026. Cambridge, UK: UNEP-WCMC and IUCN. www.protectedplanet.net — https://www.protectedplanet.net. Red List: IUCN (2025). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2025-2. https://www.iucnredlist.org; spatial data, 2022 release.

Terms

Page code (index.html, the page part of dashboard.html) and the build scripts kept in the author's project folder: MIT (see LICENSE). Data tables under data/, the data embedded in dashboard.html and the text of methods_panel.md: CC BY-NC 4.0 (see DATA_LICENSE.md); the non-commercial condition follows the terms of the IUCN Red List, Living Planet Index and WDPA inputs, and rows derived from the Living Planet Database stay under the Living Planet Index data terms. The repository contains derived summaries only: no range polygons, no protected-area polygons and no population time series are redistributed; the sources above must be credited when values are reused.