The changing role of mammal life histories in Late Quaternary extinction vulnerability on continents and islands

Lyons, S. Kathleen; Miller, Joshua H.; Fraser, Danielle; Smith, Felisa A.; Boyer, Alison G.; Lindsey, Emily; Mychajliw, Alexis M.

doi:10.1098/rsbl.2016.0342

Cited by 30 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…; Lyons et al. ), but many of these traits appear general enough to create consistent long‐term differences in extinction risk (Harnik et al. ; Finnegan et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linking speciation to extinction: Diversification raises contemporary extinction risk in amphibians

Greenberg

Mooers

2017

Evolution Letters

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Many of the traits associated with elevated rates of speciation, including niche specialization and having small and isolated populations, are similarly linked with an elevated risk of extinction. This suggests that rapidly speciating lineages may also be more extinction prone. Empirical tests of a speciation-extinction correlation are rare because assessing paleontological extinction rates is difficult. However, the modern biodiversity crisis allows us to observe patterns of extinction in real time, and if this hypothesis is true then we would expect young clades that have recently diversified to have high contemporary extinction risk.Here, we examine evolutionary patterns of modern extinction risk across over 300 genera within one of the most threatened vertebrate classes, the Amphibia. Consistent with predictions, rapidly diversifying amphibian clades also had a greater share of threatened species. Curiously, this pattern is not reflected in other tetrapod classes and may reflect a greater propensity to speciate through peripheral isolation in amphibians, which is partly supported by a negative correlation between diversification rate and mean geographic range size. This clustered threat in rapidly diversifying amphibian genera means that protecting a small number of species can achieve large gains in preserving amphibian phylogenetic diversity. Nonindependence between speciation and extinction rates has many consequences for patterns of biodiversity and how we may choose to conserve it. K E Y W O R D S :Amphibia, diversification, extinction risk, IUCN, peripatry, speciation rate, species longevity. Impact SummaryThe rates of speciation and extinction dictate the frequency at which new species arise and are lost over evolutionary time. Characteristics of species that may promote speciation include being highly specialized to particular environments, existing in isolated populations, or having a low population abundance. These same traits are also associated with extinction: specialized species are vulnerable to environmental change, species that exist in isolated pockets lack population connectivity, and small populations can blink out rapidly. This suggests that lineages speciating readily due to these traits may also readily lose species. Assessing whether speciation and extinction rates are correlated is difficult, as measuring extinction based on fossils can be biased for many groups. However, we are currently in the midst of observing numerous extinctions in real time, and observing variation in the species currently at risk of extinction may serve as a proxy measure for extinction rate across groups. In this study, we show in amphibians that lineages that have high ongoing diversification also have a greater share of species threatened with extinction compared to slowly diversifying groups. This supports the idea that speciation and extinction may go hand-in-hand. Comparing this pattern in amphibians to other clades reveals a surprising discrepancy: only plants have been found to show a similar pattern....

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“…; Lyons et al. ), but many of these traits appear general enough to create consistent long‐term differences in extinction risk (Harnik et al. ; Finnegan et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linking speciation to extinction: Diversification raises contemporary extinction risk in amphibians

Greenberg

Mooers

2017

Evolution Letters

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“…Raup [2] proposed that rules based on studying ancient extinctions are applicable to the present biodiversity crisis: (i) species with small populations are easy to kill, (ii) widespread and abundant species are resilient, (iii) the extinction of widespread species is favoured by a massive first strike, and (iv) the simultaneous extinction of many taxa requires stressors that cut across ecological lines. Subsequent research has made it clear that some clades suffer disproportionately greater impacts from human action than others [7,11], just as in the distant past the survivors of mass extinction events were taxonomically biased [12,15] and previously subordinate taxa with fortuitous pre-adaptations favoured in the aftermath.…”

Section: Extinction Selectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, deriving generalizations (e.g. identifying functional and life-history traits that predispose species to extinction due to specific causes [7]) is critical in a 'crisis discipline' where data are sparse, many uncertainties remain, and yet decisions are urgent [8].…”

Section: The Science Of Extinctionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This includes: (i) observational records of local and regional extirpations [9,10]; (ii) analyses of declines in abundance and geographical range [11,12]; (iii) models of the controls on population change [6,13]; (iv) inference from genetic changes or other indirect proxies [14,15] and (v) data on historical and deep-time extinctions, including past environmental crises [7,[16][17][18]. When combined with robust approaches to uncertainty, this opens a richer array of questions on extinction dynamics than would be possible through the lens of contemporary species losses.…”

Section: The Science Of Extinctionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pattern, process, inference and prediction in extinction biology

Brook

Alroy

2017

Biol. Lett.

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Extinction is a key feature of the evolutionary history of life, and assessments of extinction risk are essential for the effective protection of biodiversity. The goal in assembling this special issue of Biology Letters was to highlight problems and questions at the research frontier of extinction biology, with an emphasis on recent developments in the methodology of inferring the patterns and processes of extinction from a background of often noisy and sparse data. In selecting topics, we sought to illustrate how extinction is not simply a selfevident phenomenon, but the subject of a dynamic and quantitatively rigorous field of natural science, with practical applications to conservation.

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“…The principal product of RTA is a recursively branching tree that describes the direct, interactive and contextual relationships between the response variable (here Si) and a subset of the predictor variables (geographic and ecological variables) (see e.g. Durst & Roth, 2012Lomolino et al, 2012Lomolino et al, , 2013Lyons et al, 2016;Van der Geer et al, 2018 for descriptions and application of classification and regression tree analyses to body size patterns). For each RTA, I obtained an optimal tree, selected based on K-fold cross-validation, and a maximal tree, produced by growing interactively the respective optimal tree as large as possible (SAS Institute, 2017).…”

Section: Description Of Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Space–time patterns of body size variation in island bovids: The key role of predatory release

Rozzi

2018

Journal of Biogeography

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Aim I provide the first comprehensive study on body size evolution of extinct and living insular bovids, exploring the causal biotic and abiotic selective factors for observed patterns. Location Islands worldwide. Methods I assembled data on the geographic characteristics of 13 focal islands (area, isolation, latitude, net primary productivity) and on the ecological and morphological characteristics of 32 insular bovid taxa (number of predators and competitors, richness of large mammals, body mass of mainland relatives). I used linear regressions and machine learning methods (regression trees and random forest analyses) to examine the hypothesized contextual importance of these factors in explaining variation in the body size of island bovids. I also calculated evolutionary rates of body size divergence of focal taxa in order to assess whether this phenomenon is influenced by time in isolation. Results The results of regression, regression tree and random forest analyses were in agreement with predictions based on a hypothesis of ecological release (more pronounced body size divergence on islands with the fewest competitors and predators). Only limited support for a resource limitation hypothesis (more pronounced body size divergence for the larger taxa on smaller islands) was found. Main conclusions The majority of insular bovids, as large mammals, do follow the main prediction of the island rule, exhibiting body size reduction, and predator diversity is the main factor influencing body size evolution of these taxa. Results obtained highlighted the crucial role of time in isolation, with body size reduction becoming more pronounced for bovids with longer residence times on the islands.

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The changing role of mammal life histories in Late Quaternary extinction vulnerability on continents and islands

Cited by 30 publications

References 22 publications

Linking speciation to extinction: Diversification raises contemporary extinction risk in amphibians

Linking speciation to extinction: Diversification raises contemporary extinction risk in amphibians

Pattern, process, inference and prediction in extinction biology

Space–time patterns of body size variation in island bovids: The key role of predatory release

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