Precise Estimates of Modern Biodiversity Extinction Rates

Just imagine organisms have evolved over 3.5 billion years, nature through trial and error and cosmic forces has created an environment that is adaptable, functional and sustainable. This is an intelligent system where all the parts are known by the whole in my view. What happens when extinction occurs and how does that affect the web of life? This is my question. To understand the extraordinary diversity and interconnection is a job that I cannot imagine, yet there are scientists willing to get started. This is the real work in society, I don’t feel making money for the sake of status and the feeling of success is the key to a happy sustainable life. I feel pre-serving life is. We have debates based on science that is incomplete, I feel the true story is far more complex and the need for stewardship is no more important than today. Again, my viewpoint there. You choose what is true for you and how you contribute to a world fit for children.

This is an article from the Australian Centre for Ecological Analysis & Synethesis refer http://www.aceas.org.au Check out their website for more information.

The Earth’s biodiversity has experienced 5 mass extinction events since the Cambrian. Extinction has kept pace with speciation, with >99% of all species that have ever existed now gone. Despite consensus that biodiversity has entered the 6th mass extinction, dubbed the Anthropocene because of human-driven changes, estimated extinction rates above background are highly imprecise. This arises partly because species richness is unknown for many taxa, and most extinctions go unnoticed. Without precise estimates of modern extinction rates, the urgency of the biodiversity crisis is not appreciated by society, and efforts to reduce biodiversity loss are weakened. We propose to collate existing information on the extent of meta-population extinctions of various Australian and global taxa. We will begin with Australian plants, mammals, birds & molluscs as 4 well-studied taxa within a single continent. Extinctions will be inferred from rates of observed meta-population extirpations. Given the good fossil evidence of pre-human extinctions in Australia, our inferred extinction rates will be compared to determine the modern inflation factor. We will also trawl the literature and update rates based on observed disappearances, correcting for unobserved extinctions using zero-inflated models. Using these empirical estimates, we will extend our range to global extinction rates based on state-of-the-art species-area relationships of species loss.