Human Population Density and Extinction Risk in the World's Carnivores

By M. Cardillo, Andy Purvis, W. Sechrest, J. L. Gittleman, J. Bielby, Georgina M. Mace. PLoS Biology, 2004

603 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding why some species are at high risk of extinction, while others remain relatively safe, is central to the development of a predictive conservation science. Recent studies have shown that a species' extinction risk may be determined by two types of factors: intrinsic biological traits and exposure to external anthropogenic threats. However, little is known about the relative and interacting effects of intrinsic and external variables on extinction risk. Using phylogenetic comparative methods, we show that extinction risk in the mammal order Carnivora is predicted more strongly by biology than exposure to high-density human populations. However, biology interacts with human population density to determine extinction risk: biological traits explain 80% of variation in risk for carnivore species with high levels of exposure to human populations, compared to 45% for carnivores generally. The results suggest that biology will become a more critical determinant of risk as human populations expand. We demonstrate how a model predicting extinction risk from biology can be combined with projected human population density to identify species likely to move most rapidly towards extinction by the year 2030. African viverrid species are particularly likely to become threatened, even though most are currently considered relatively safe. We suggest that a preemptive approach to species conservation is needed to identify and protect species that may not be threatened at present but may become so in the near future.

Subfields: Ecology, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd4e33138813a70d140587cfa1bce044fa5574a8

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Citations in the corpus

Insights into wolf presence in human‐dominated landscapes: the relative role of food availability, humans and landscape attributes (2012, background): “…transformation, suggesting a regional variation in the species’ sensitivity to humans and their activities, driven by other human, biological or environmental factors (Woodroffe, 2000; Linnell et al., 2001; Cardillo et al., 2004; Blanco & Cortés, 2007; Basille et al., 2009; Agarwala et al., 2010).”
Carnivore biodiversity in Tanzania: revealing the distribution patterns of secretive mammals using camera traps (2010, background): “Carnivores are also among those taxa most sensitive to changes in the environment: as potential carnivore habitat continues to become degraded and lost to conservation (Woodroffe, 2000; Crooks, 2002; Cardillo et al., 2004) establishing the status of the remaining carnivores has become an increasingl”
Body mass and extinction risk in Australian marsupials: The ‘Critical Weight Range’ revisited (2009, background): “Second, many large mammals which have declined elsewhere have been carnivores ( Cardillo et al. 2004b, 2005 ), while all living marsupials of mainland Australia that are above the CWR are herbivores, Fig. 1. Relationship of persistence to body mass in Australian marsupials.”
Perceptions of Human–Carnivore Conflicts in the High Andes of Argentina (2008, background): “…(2001), autoecological studies, as well as detailed population biology research, should be coupled with simultaneous conservation actions, especially when dealing with small, little-known carnivores and when conservation resources are limited (Clark et al 2001; Macdonald and Sillero-Zubiri 2004).”
Imputation of missing data in life‐history trait datasets: which approach performs the best? (2014, background): “Some approaches deal with missing values in data analyses using phylogenetic comparative approaches (Cardillo et al. 2004), but do not fully address the issue of losing statistical power as rows with missing values are excluded from the analyses.”
Differential impact of landscape transformation on pumas (Puma concolor) and jaguars (Panthera onca) in the Upper Paraná Atlantic Forest (2011, background): “Instead of these intrinsic biological traits, population and range reduction can result from the exposure to direct external anthropogenic threats, such as human persecution (Cardillo et al., 2004).”
Ecological and socio-economic factors affecting extinction risk in parrots (2016, background): “Particular biological attributes can allow populations to recover rapidly from depletion and can offer a degree of resilience from external threats (Cardillo et al. 2004).”
Can intrinsic factors explain population declines in North American breeding shorebirds? A comparative analysis (2006, methodology): “Although recent studies have highlighted the importance of interactions between extinction risk and the type of threat on a species (e.g. habitat loss, human persecution, predation; see Owens & Bennett, 2000; Cardillo et al., 2004), there were insufficient data on the type of threats for most shoreb”
Global raptor research and conservation priorities: Tropical raptors fall prey to knowledge gaps (2019, methodology): “…Red List classifications are based on quantitative criteria used to separate species into categories of threat along a continuum of extinction risk (Cardillo et al., 2004; Collen et al., 2016; Purvis et al., 2000) and because our random forest models of extinction risk (see methods above) showed…”