ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2017
What North America's skeleton crew of megafauna tells us about community disassembly.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lost giants, lost functions: palaeodietary insights into the ecological niches of Pleistocene ground sloths.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Unravelling the functional and phylogenetic dimensions of novel ecosystem assemblages.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- After the mammoths: The ecological legacy of late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2023Review
- Late quaternary biotic homogenization of North American mammalian faunas.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Investigating the reliability of metapodials as taxonomic Indicators for Beringian horses.Journal of mammalian evolution · 2022Article
- Erosion of global functional diversity across the tree of life.Science advances · 2021Article
- Functional traits of the world's late Quaternary large-bodied avian and mammalian herbivores.Scientific data · 2021Article
- Homogenization of carnivorous mammal ensembles caused by global range reductions of large-bodied hypercarnivores during the late Quaternary.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Introduced herbivores restore Late Pleistocene ecological functions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
1 author.
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Abstract
Functional trait diversity is increasingly used to model future changes in community structure despite a poor understanding of community disassembly's effects on functional diversity. By tracking the functional diversity of the North American large mammal fauna through the End-Pleistocene megafaunal extinction and up to the present, I show that contrary to expectations, functionally unique species are no more likely to go extinct than functionally redundant species. This makes total functional richness loss no worse than expected given similar taxonomic richness declines. However, where current species sit in functional space relative to pre-anthropogenic baselines is not random and likely explains ecosystem functional changes better than total functional richness declines. Prehistoric extinctions have left many extant species functionally isolated and future extinctions will cause even more rapid drops in functional richness.
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