The past and future human impact on mammalian diversity

@article{Andermann2020ThePA,
  title={The past and future human impact on mammalian diversity},
  author={Tobias Andermann and S{\o}ren Faurby and Samuel T. Turvey and Alexandre Antonelli and Daniele Silvestro},
  journal={Science Advances},
  year={2020},
  volume={6}
}
Human driven extinctions of recent past pale in comparison to future predictions, as a major global extinction wave is unfolding. To understand the current biodiversity crisis, it is crucial to determine how humans have affected biodiversity in the past. However, the extent of human involvement in species extinctions from the Late Pleistocene onward remains contentious. Here, we apply Bayesian models to the fossil record to estimate how mammalian extinction rates have changed over the past 126… 
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38 Citations
Background Citations
9
Methods Citations
1
Results Citations
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38 Citations

Extinctions have strongly reduced the mammalian consumption of primary productivity
TLDR
The results show that mammalian herbivores naturally play an important part in ecosystems at a global scale, but that this effect has been strongly reduced by extinctions and extirpations.
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A spatially and phylogenetically explicit model parameterised with life history traits and metrics of demographic resilience using the open-access COMPADRE and COMADRE databases, coupled with high-resolution human impact information via the Human Footprint database finds that urban areas host a limited diversity of strategies that achieve demographic resilience.
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Since Darwin, studies of human evolution have tended to give primacy to open ‘savannah’ environments as the ecological cradle of our lineage, with dense tropical forests cast as hostile, unfavourable…
Two major extinction events in the evolutionary history of turtles: one caused by a meteorite, the other by hominins
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TLDR
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People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years
TLDR
The most up-to-date, spatially explicit global reconstruction of historical human populations and land use is used to show that the current biodiversity crisis can seldom be explained by the loss of uninhabited wildlands, resulting instead from the appropriation, colonization, and intensifiers of the biodiverse cultural landscapes long shaped and sustained by prior societies.
Prey Size Decline as a Unifying Ecological Selecting Agent in Pleistocene Human Evolution
TLDR
It is argued that the need to mitigate the additional energetic cost of acquiring progressively smaller prey may have been an ecological selecting agent in fundamental adaptive modes demonstrated in the Paleolithic archaeological record.
Factors influencing range contraction of a rodent herbivore in a steppe grassland over the past decades
Abstract Climate warming and human disturbance are known to be key drivers in causing range contraction of many species, but quantitative assessment on their distinctive and interactive effects on…
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