Assessing the information-content of messy data to reconstruct population recovery dynamics for the world's rarest primate.

Understanding the dynamics of population recovery in threatened species requires robust longitudinal monitoring datasets. However, evidence-based decision-making is often impeded by variable data collection approaches, necessitating critical evaluation of restricted available baselines. The Hainan gibbon, the world's rarest primate, had possibly declined to only seven or eight individuals in 1978 at Bawangling National Nature Reserve but has experienced subsequent population growth.

Anthropogenic predictors of varying Holocene occurrence for Europe's large mammal fauna.

Understanding how species respond to different anthropogenic pressures is essential for conservation planning. The archaeological record has great potential to inform extinction risk assessment by providing evidence on past human-caused biodiversity loss, but identifying specific drivers of past declines from environmental archives has proved challenging. We used 17 684 Holocene zooarchaeological records for 15 European large mammal species together with data on past environmental conditions and anthropogenic activities across Europe, to assess the ability of environmental archives to determine the relative importance of different human pressures in shaping faunal distributions through time.

Global biodiversity conservation requires traditional Chinese medicine trade to be sustainable and well regulated.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is highlighted by conservation practitioners as an ongoing threat to many overharvested plant and animal species, including several charismatic threatened vertebrates. However, studies that provide evidence-based and practical recommendations on how to better regulate the TCM trade for sustainability and biodiversity conservation remain limited. China is the biggest promotor of and market for TCM and understanding the TCM trade in China is important for global biodiversity conservation.

Dietary isotopes of Madagascar's extinct megafauna reveal holocene browsing and grazing guilds.

Megafauna play a disproportionate role in developing and maintaining their biomes, by regulating plant dispersal, community structure and nutrient cycling. Understanding the ecological roles of extinct megafaunal communities, for example through dietary reconstruction using isotope analysis, is necessary to determine pre-human states and set evidence-based restoration goals. We use C and N isotopic analyses to reconstruct Holocene feeding guilds in Madagascar's extinct megaherbivores, which included elephant birds, hippopotami and giant tortoises that occurred across multiple habitats and elevations.

The medium over the message: Differential knowledge of conservation outreach activities and implications for threatened species.

Conservation outreach is regularly conducted to increase support for conservation by altering local awareness and attitudes about species or environmental issues. However, there is often little assessment of the effectiveness of these activities. We investigated knowledge of past conservation outreach in 26 villages adjacent to Bawangling National Nature Reserve, Hainan, China, which contains the last population of the Hainan gibbon (Nomascus hainanus).

Extinct insular oryzomyine rice rats (Rodentia: Sigmodontinae) from the Grenada Bank, southern Caribbean.

The Lesser Antillean island chain in the eastern Caribbean formerly supported a diverse rodent fauna including multiple endemic genera of oryzomyine rice rats. The Caribbean rice rats are now all extinct, with most island populations known only from Holocene palaeontological and zooarchaeological material and with many remaining taxonomically undescribed. Rice rat material is reported from several pre-Columbian Ceramic Age (late Holocene) archaeological sites on the Grenada Bank, including sites on Grenada and Carriacou, but the taxonomic identity and diversity of the Grenada Bank rice rats has remained uncertain.

Identifying the possibilities and pitfalls of conducting IUCN Red List assessments from remotely sensed habitat information based on insights from poorly known Cuban mammals.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species (RLS) is the key global tool for objective, repeatable assessment of species' extinction risk status, and plays an essential role in tracking biodiversity loss and guiding conservation action. Satellite remote sensing (SRS) data sets on global ecosystem distributions and functioning show exciting potential for informing range-based RLS assessment, but their incorporation has been restricted by low temporal resolution and coverage of data sets, lack of incorporation of degradation-driven habitat loss, and noninclusion of assumptions related to identification of changing habitat distributions for taxa with varying habitat dependency and ecologies. For poorly known mangrove-associated Cuban hutias (Mesocapromys spp.

Ancient DNA Suggests Single Colonization and Within-Archipelago Diversification of Caribbean Caviomorph Rodents.

Reconstructing the evolutionary history of island biotas is complicated by unusual morphological evolution in insular environments. However, past human-caused extinctions limit the use of molecular analyses to determine origins and affinities of enigmatic island taxa. The Caribbean formerly contained a morphologically diverse assemblage of caviomorph rodents (33 species in 19 genera), ranging from ∼0.

The past and future human impact on mammalian diversity.

To understand the current biodiversity crisis, it is crucial to determine how humans have affected biodiversity in the past. However, the extent of human involvement in species extinctions from the Late Pleistocene onward remains contentious. Here, we apply Bayesian models to the fossil record to estimate how mammalian extinction rates have changed over the past 126,000 years, inferring specific times of rate increases.

Rapid size change associated with intra-island evolutionary radiation in extinct Caribbean "island-shrews".

Background: The Caribbean offers a unique opportunity to study evolutionary dynamics in insular mammals. However, the recent extinction of most Caribbean non-volant mammals has obstructed evolutionary studies, and poor DNA preservation associated with tropical environments means that very few ancient DNA sequences are available for extinct vertebrates known from the region's Holocene subfossil record. The endemic Caribbean eulipotyphlan family Nesophontidae ("island-shrews") became extinct ~ 500 years ago, and the taxonomic validity of many Nesophontes species and their wider evolutionary dynamics remain unclear.

Biodiversity Conservation and the Earth System: Mind the Gap.

One of the most striking human impacts on global biodiversity is the ongoing depletion of large vertebrates from terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Recent work suggests this loss of megafauna can affect processes at biome or Earth system scales with potentially serious impacts on ecosystem structure and function, ecosystem services, and biogeochemical cycles. We argue that our contemporary approach to biodiversity conservation focuses on spatial scales that are too small to adequately address these impacts.

Assessing congruence of opportunistic records and systematic surveys for predicting Hispaniolan mammal species distributions.

Comparative assessment of the relative information content of different independent spatial data types is necessary to evaluate whether they provide congruent biogeographic signals for predicting species ranges. Opportunistic occurrence records and systematically collected survey data are available from the Dominican Republic for Hispaniola's surviving endemic non-volant mammals, the Hispaniolan solenodon () and Hispaniolan hutia (); opportunistic records (archaeological, historical and recent) exist from across the entire country, and systematic survey data have been collected from seven protected areas. Species distribution models were developed in maxent for solenodons and hutias using both data types, with species habitat suitability and potential country-level distribution predicted using seven biotic and abiotic environmental variables.