Madagascar's extraordinary biodiversity: Threats and opportunities.

Madagascar's unique biota is heavily affected by human activity and is under intense threat. Here, we review the current state of knowledge on the conservation status of Madagascar's terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity by presenting data and analyses on documented and predicted species-level conservation statuses, the most prevalent and relevant threats, ex situ collections and programs, and the coverage and comprehensiveness of protected areas. The existing terrestrial protected area network in Madagascar covers 10.

Loss of functional diversity through anthropogenic extinctions of island birds is not offset by biotic invasions.

Human impacts reshape ecological communities through the extinction and introduction of species. The combined impact of these factors depends on whether non-native species fill the functional roles of extinct species, thus buffering the loss of functional diversity. This question has been difficult to address, because comprehensive information about past extinctions and their traits is generally lacking.

Projected losses of global mammal and bird ecological strategies.

Species, and their ecological strategies, are disappearing. Here we use species traits to quantify the current and projected future ecological strategy diversity for 15,484 land mammals and birds. We reveal an ecological strategy surface, structured by life-history (fast-slow) and body mass (small-large) as one major axis, and diet (invertivore-herbivore) and habitat breadth (generalist-specialist) as the other.

Improving generation length estimates for the IUCN Red List.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List classifies species according to their risk of extinction, informing local to global conservation decisions. Here we look to advance the estimation of generation length, which is used as a time-scalar in the Red List as a way of accounting for differences in species' life-histories. We calculated or predicted generation length for 86 species of antelope following the Rspan approach.

Resource partitioning between ungulate populations in arid environments.

Herbivores are major drivers of ecosystem structure, diversity, and function. Resilient ecosystems therefore require viable herbivore populations in a sustainable balance with environmental resource availability. This balance is becoming harder to achieve, with increasingly threatened species reliant on small protected areas in increasingly harsh and unpredictable environments.