Impending extinction crisis of the world’s primates: Why primates matter

By A. Estrada, P. A. Garber, A. Rylands, C. Roos, Eduardo Fernández-Duque, A. D. Fiore, K. Nekaris, V. Nijman, E. Heymann, J. Lambert and 21 more. Science Advances, 2017

1,268 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Impending extinction of the world’s primates due to human activities; immediate global attention is needed to reverse the trend. Nonhuman primates, our closest biological relatives, play important roles in the livelihoods, cultures, and religions of many societies and offer unique insights into human evolution, biology, behavior, and the threat of emerging diseases. They are an essential component of tropical biodiversity, contributing to forest regeneration and ecosystem health. Current information shows the existence of 504 species in 79 genera distributed in the Neotropics, mainland Africa, Madagascar, and Asia. Alarmingly, ~60% of primate species are now threatened with extinction and ~75% have declining populations. This situation is the result of escalating anthropogenic pressures on primates and their habitats—mainly global and local market demands, leading to extensive habitat loss through the expansion of industrial agriculture, large-scale cattle ranching, logging, oil and gas drilling, mining, dam building, and the construction of new road networks in primate range regions. Other important drivers are increased bushmeat hunting and the illegal trade of primates as pets and primate body parts, along with emerging threats, such as climate change and anthroponotic diseases. Often, these pressures act in synergy, exacerbating primate population declines. Given that primate range regions overlap extensively with a large, and rapidly growing, human population characterized by high levels of poverty, global attention is needed immediately to reverse the looming risk of primate extinctions and to attend to local human needs in sustainable ways. Raising global scientific and public awareness of the plight of the world’s primates and the costs of their loss to ecosystem health and human society is imperative.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1cbdd557f0be6b82c84f19ee19693d921ac35878

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The Implications of Primate Behavioral Flexibility for Sustainable Human–Primate Coexistence in Anthropogenic Habitats (2017, background): “Given severe threats to the survival of primates globally (Estrada et al. 2017), it is critical to understand how different species respond to anthropogenic change, and the extent to which behavioral flexibility will help them survive in the face of ongoing changes.”
Emerging threats and persistent conservation challenges for freshwater biodiversity (2018, background): “While there are ‘emerging threats’ reviews for terrestrial (e.g. Estrada et al. , 2017) and marine (e.g. Harvell et al. , 1999) systems, they are often habitat-or issue-speciﬁc (e.g. Calmon et al. , 2011), and we know of no such recent publication for freshwater biodiversity.”
Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change (2019, neutral): “Many species that are large, slow-growing,habitatspecialist,orcarnivorous — such as large cats ( 35 ), large sharks ( 36 ), primates ( 37 ),reef-buildingcorals( 38 ),andwoodyplants ( 39 ) — are declining rapidly in, and being lost from,manyplaces.”
Primate responses to anthropogenic habitat disturbance: A pantropical meta-analysis (2017, background): “Considering that nearly 60% of all primate species are currently threatened with extinction (Estrada et al., 2017), understanding what drives this variation in species responses to human-induced environmental stressors is crucial to enhance the effectiveness of conservation actions.”