Response to commentary ‘towards more meaningful scenarios of biodiversity responses to land-use change in Central Asia

With this letter, we respond to the commentary by Kamp et al. on our paper (Nunez et al. in Reg Environ Chang 20:39, 2020) that reports on potential biodiversity change in Central Asian grasslands using climate and land-use change scenarios. In their commentary, Kamp et al. criticize data and methods employed and discuss several shortfalls of our approach. In this response, we argue that in our paper projections of future biodiversity already acknowledge the issues indicated by Kamp et al. We elaborate on the reasons why. We maintain our main finding that, based on a number of contrasting scenarios (shared socioeconomic pathways and representative concentration pathways combinations), biodiversity in grasslands in Central Asia will potentially decline under each scenario. We conclude that while our data and methods conservatively estimate potential biodiversity changes in the Central Asian grasslands, they could be enriched with more elements. The results, however, are likely to confirm the vulnerability of these grasslands and the possible decline in their biodiversity.