Global land-use change rivals climate change in driving projected diversity shifts of terrestrial vertebrates

Global biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate under the combined pressures of climate and land-use change, yet their relative contributions and underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, we developed a filtering-energy-stress framework to characterize multidimensional land-use change and integrate it, together with climate change, into species distribution models for projecting future biodiversity dynamics under shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs). We found that 68.14% of terrestrial land was projected to experience richness declines by 2100, with land-use change contributing 47.94% of total changes, comparable to climate change (52.06%). The Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) analysis revealed that available energy was the most influential land-use dimension across vertebrate taxa, outperforming habitat suitability and land-use intensity. These findings underscore the importance of considering multiple ecological dimensions of land-use change beyond land-cover categories and provide a mechanistic framework for disentangling climate and land-use impacts to inform integrated conservation strategies.