AI Article Synopsis
- It's important to understand why some animals go extinct to help protect them and preserve biodiversity.
- The study looks at how extinctions happened in the past when humans arrived on different land areas, like continents and islands, and how size and life traits of animals played a role.
- The findings suggest that while big animals were mostly affected by extinctions long ago, during historic times, there were more diverse impacts, but humans continued to be a major reason for these extinctions.*
Article Abstract
Understanding extinction drivers in a human-dominated world is necessary to preserve biodiversity. We provide an overview of Quaternary extinctions and compare mammalian extinction events on continents and islands after human arrival in system-specific prehistoric and historic contexts. We highlight the role of body size and life-history traits in these extinctions. We find a significant size-bias except for extinctions on small islands in historic times. Using phylogenetic regression and classification trees, we find that while life-history traits are poor predictors of historic extinctions, those associated with difficulty in responding quickly to perturbations, such as small litter size, are good predictors of prehistoric extinctions. Our results are consistent with the idea that prehistoric and historic extinctions form a single continuing event with the same likely primary driver, humans, but the diversity of impacts and affected faunas is much greater in historic extinctions.
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Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4938058 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2016.0342 | DOI Listing |
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