A balance of winners and losers in the Anthropocene
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Date
08/04/2019Author
Grant ID
250189
727440
60501
Keywords
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Show full item recordAbstract
Scientists disagree about the nature of biodiversity change. While there is evidence for widespread declines from population surveys, assemblage surveys reveal a mix of declines and increases. These conflicting conclusions may be caused by the use of different metrics: assemblage metrics may average out drastic changes in individual populations. Alternatively, differences may arise from data sources: populations monitored individually, versus whole-assemblage monitoring. To test these hypotheses, we estimated population change metrics using assemblage data. For a set of 23 241 populations, 16 009 species, in 158 assemblages, we detected significantly accelerating extinction and colonisation rates, with both rates being approximately balanced. Most populations (85%) did not show significant trends in abundance, and those that did were balanced between winners (8%) and losers (7%). Thus, population metrics estimated with assemblage data are commensurate with assemblage metrics and reveal sustained and increasing species turnover.
Citation
Dornelas , M , Gotelli , N J , Shimadzu , H , Moyes , F , Magurran , A E & McGill , B J 2019 , ' A balance of winners and losers in the Anthropocene ' , Ecology Letters , vol. 22 , no. 5 , pp. 847-854 . https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13242
Publication
Ecology Letters
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1461-023XType
Journal article
Description
The authors are grateful to the European Research Council (AdG BioTIME 250189 and PoC BioCHANGE 72744) for funding. MD is funded by a Leverhulme Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust and by the John Templeton Foundation grant #60501 ‘Putting the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis to the Test’. BJM was funded by a USDA Hatch grant to MAFES #1011538 and NSF ABI grant #1660000.Collections
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