来源：《新科学家》
原文刊登日期：2021年4月15日
本文适合英语二考生
Most of Earth’s land habitats have lost their ecological integrity, including areas previously categorised as being intact.
地球上的大部分陆地栖息地已经失去了生态完整性，包括以前被归类为完整的地区。
Ecological integrity encompasses three measures of intactness. Habitat intactness is a measure of the extent to which people have made changes to the land, faunal intactness is a measure of the number of animal species lost from a habitat, and functional intactness measures whether there are enough animals of individual species to effectively play their part in a functioning ecosystem.
生态完整性包括三个完整性指标。栖息地完整性是衡量人们改变土地的程度，动物区系完整性是衡量从栖息地损失的动物物种数量，功能完整性是衡量是否有足够的单个物种的动物在一个正常的生态系统中有效地发挥作用。
“We only find about 2 to 3 per cent of the Earth’s land is where you could be considered as having the same fauna and flora that you had 500 years ago, in pre-industrial times, before major human impacts had occurred,” says Andrew Plumptre, head of the Key Biodiversity Areas Secretariat.
关键生物多样性领域秘书处负责人安德鲁·普卢姆特雷表示：“我们发现，地球上只有大约2%到3%的土地可以被视为拥有500年前工业化时代人类遭受重大影响之前的动植物群”。
Plumptre and his colleagues combined data on human impacts and loss of animal species from various global databases to map the ecological integrity of different regions.
Plumptre和他的同事们结合了各种全球数据库中关于人类影响和动物物种损失的数据，绘制了不同地区的生态完整性图。
Only 11 per cent of ecologically intact sites lie within environmentally protected areas. However, many other of the intact sites, including parts of the Sahara, Amazon and northern Canada, are within territories managed by indigenous communities, which have played a role in maintaining ecological integrity.
只有11%的生态完好地点位于环境保护区内。然而，许多其他完整的地方，包括撒哈拉、亚马逊和加拿大北部的部分地区，都在原住民社区管理的领土内，原住民社区在维护生态完整方面发挥了作用。
“Conservation of intact ecosystems is critical for the maintenance of biodiversity on Earth, and in turn for the services that these ecosystems provide to humans,” says Kimberly Komatsu at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland.
马里兰州史密森环境研究中心的小松金伯利说：“保护完整的生态系统对维持地球上的生物多样性至关重要，反过来也对这些生态系统为人类提供的服务至关重要。”
The team determined that by reintroducing between one and five different species to sites that aren’t completely degraded, ecological integrity could be restored across about 20 per cent of Earth’s land.
该团队确定，通过将1到5种不同的物种重新引入尚未完全退化的地点，地球上大约20%的土地的生态完整性可以得到恢复。
“At the moment, we’re living in this decade from 2020 to 2030, called the decade of restoration and everyone is thinking about restoring degraded habitat to make it better,” says Plumptre. He says it’s important not to focus simply on restoring habitat intactness, but also on faunal and in particular functional intactness.
“目前，我们生活在从2020年到2030年的这十年，被称为恢复的十年，每个人都在考虑恢复退化的栖息地，使其变得更好，”普拉姆崔说。他说，重要的是不能只关注恢复栖息地的完整性，还要关注动物，尤其是功能的完整性。
“While species reintroductions are a much harder task than protecting currently intact ecosystems, these sites still represent a great opportunity to invest in conservation to promote the health of our planet,” says Komatsu.
小松说：“虽然物种重新引入比保护目前完整的生态系统要困难得多，但这些地点仍然代表着投资保护以促进我们地球健康的巨大机会。”