Drivers of Extinction Risk in Terrestrial Vertebrates

By S. Ducatez, R. Shine. 2017

87 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rising rates of extinction create an urgent need to identify the mechanisms and drivers of endangerment. One critical question is whether major phylogenetic lineages are equally at risk to the same threats. We used the IUCN Red List classification to explore the effect of four major threatening processes (habitat alteration, invasive species, climate change and overexploitation) on 7,441 species in four terrestrial vertebrate classes. As expected, species rated as vulnerable to a higher number of threats were also at greater risk of extinction. However, this pattern differed strongly among classes. Notably, invasive species and climate change were strongly associated with increased risk of extinction in birds but not mammals. These large‐scale differences might be artifacts of differing methodologies used by class specialists to classify species vulnerability; or might reflect biological differences. That ambiguity needs to be resolved, because it has strong implications for the assessment and amelioration of threatening processes.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d7d65033ab365c3a9b39677f6eeeb3f30ced6864

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

1. F. Maisels
2. L. Coad

In Ecology

1. J. Poulsen
2. Matthias Waltert
3. M. Nielsen
4. Jörn P. W. Scharlemann
5. F. Maisels
6. L. Coad

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

1. Matthias Waltert
2. Jörn P. W. Scharlemann
3. F. Maisels

Citations in the corpus

• Assessing Africa‐Wide Pangolin Exploitation by Scaling Local Data (2018, background): “Overexploitation is one of the main pressures causing species’ declines and local extinctions (Maxwell et al. 2016; Ducatez & Shine 2017).”