A systematic review of the relation between species traits and extinction risk
By Filipe Chichorro, A. Juslén, Pedro Cardoso. bioRxiv, 2018
119 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Biodiversity is shrinking rapidly, and despite our efforts only a small part of it has been assessed for extinction risk. Identifying the traits that make species vulnerable might help us to predict the outcome for those less known. We gathered information on the relations of traits to extinction risk from 173 publications, across all taxa, spatial scales and biogeographical regions, in what we think is the most comprehensive compilation to date. The Palaearctic is the most represented biogeographical realm in extinction risk studies, but the other realms are also well sampled for all vertebrate groups. Other taxa are less well represented and there are gaps for some biogeographical realms. Many traits have been suggested to be good predictors of extinction risk. Among these, our meta-analyses were successful in identifying two as potentially useful in assessing risk for the lesser-known species: regardless of the taxon, species with small range and habitat breadth – two of the three classic dimensions of rarity – are more vulnerable to extinction. On the other hand, body size (the most studied trait) did not present a consistently positive or negative response. Large species can be more, or less, threatened than their smaller counterparts, depending on the taxon and spatial setting. In line with recent research, we hypothesize that the relationship between body size and extinction risk is shaped by different aspects, namely body size is a proxy for different phenomena depending on the taxonomic group, and there might be relevant interactions between body size and the specific threat that a species faces. With implications across all traits, a particular focus in future studies should be given to the interaction between traits and threats. Furthermore, intraspecific variability of traits should be part of future studies whenever data is available. We also propose two complementary paths to better understand extinction risk dynamics: (i) the simulation of virtual species and settings for theoretical insights, and (ii) the use of comprehensive and comparable empirical data representative of all taxa and regions under a unified study.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86eeec544b86d9ee50f63377778b096ac7a6895e
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In Ecological Modeling
In Global and Planetary Change
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Insect responses to global change offer signposts for biodiversity and conservation (2020, background): “Insects with small geographic ranges and specialised habitat requirements generally show more negative trends than generalists (Koh et al., 2004; Chichorro et al., 2019; Hofmann et al., 2019; Powney et al., 2019), and more sedentary, habitat-specialist insects, or those with narrower range sizes,…”