About LIFE
What is LIFE?
The Land-cover change Impacts on Future Extinctions (LIFE) metric quantifies the impact of human-driven habitat changes on species extinctions. It captures the direct impact of human land-use—our most significant influence on biodiversity—allowing the effects of a wide range of actions, from large-scale conservation efforts down to our individual dietary choices, to be measured in terms of their impact on extinctions, without the need for end users themselves to have access to high-performance computing.
Using LIFE
LIFE helps measure the extinction impact of any action that affects land-cover. For example:
Measuring harm to biodiversity by integrating with data on land-cover change,
Linking with agricultural and trade data to assess the impact of food production and consumption,
Prioritising competing conservation investments,
Prioritising restoration efforts, and
Combining with counterfactual methods to evaluate the effectiveness of conservation projects.
Key properties
LIFE models species-specific responses to changes in land-cover (i.e., conversion from one land type to another) - the most significant way in which humans threaten biodiversity.
LIFE focuses on extinctions, because these are irreversible, and because they are of even greater concern to the public than other aspects of biodiversity loss.
It currently uses data on >30,000 species of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians - the only groups for which range and habitat preference data is available for more or less all species.
It can be disaggregated to allow the impact on individual species or groups of species to be determined.
It is on a ratio scale - meaning that values are directly comparable between locations and that negative and positive values (denoting reductions or increases in numbers of extinctions, respectively) are numerically equal and opposite to each other.
It is scalable - the layer can be reliably used for assessing the impact of actions that are much larger or smaller than the size of the cells for calculating and plotting LIFE scores without requiring further analysis at new scales.
Future developments
The aim is that LIFE layers will be updated regularly to incorporate the newest data on species and habitat distributions. Beyond this, further work is ongoing to look at the impact of different land-cover conversions (e.g., the impact of urban development) as well as the impact of changes in habitat quality and, in the case of agriculture, the intensity of human land-use. Modelling efforts are underway to parameterise the shape of the extinction curve. We also plan to broaden the taxonomic scope by integrating data on additional taxa. Finally, we are working to incorporate measures of uncertainty into our layers to improve their robustness and reliability.
Scientific basis and applications
The theory and assumptions underlying the LIFE metric was established in "LIFE: A metric for mapping the impact of land-cover change on global extinctions," published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0327).
Further work has been done to parameterise the shape of the extinction curve in "A general relationship between population size and extinction risk," in review (doi.org/10.33774/coe-2024-m9dqp-v3).
LIFE has been used to quantify the impact of the food we eat in "Food impacts on species extinction risks can vary by three orders of magnitude," published in Nature Food (doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01224-w).
We explore the scope and flexibility of the LIFE metric by applying it to a range of conservation issues from tracking near real-time forest loss through to measuring the effectiveness of conservation in "Informing conservation problems and actions using an indicator of extinction risk: A detailed assessment of applying the LIFE metric," published in Biological Conservation (doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2025.111663).