ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Introduced herbivores restore Late Pleistocene ecological functions.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 29 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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
29 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Native and introduced megafauna have convergent effects on animals and ecosystems: a meta-analysis.Nature communications · 2026Pooled it
- Reevaluating introduced herbivores in conservation.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Article
- Trait-based approaches to restoration ecology: Synthesizing insights from diverse systems.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2026Review
- Many pasts, many futures: Navigating the complexities of species reshuffling to help prevent extinctions.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2026Review
- Large mammalian herbivores influence the deployment of microbial extracellular enzymes to control soil carbon cycling.Biogeochemistry · 2026Article
- Harms of introduced large herbivores outweigh benefits to native biodiversity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Widespread ecological novelty across the terrestrial biosphere.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Uncooling the planet: Rewilding for function in a post-Pleistocene climate.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2025Review
- Article
- Long-term biotic homogenization in the East African Rift System over the last 6 million years of hominin evolution.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- The Ecological Separation of Deer and Domestic, Feral and Native Mammals in Tropical Northern Australia-A Review.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Review
- The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions: Patterns, causes, ecological consequences and implications for ecosystem management in the Anthropocene.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2024Review
- Megafaunal extinctions, not climate change, may explain Holocene genetic diversity declines ineLife · 2023Article
- Defaunation and species introductions alter long-term functional trait diversity in insular reptiles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Megaherbivores modify forest structure and increase carbon stocks through multiple pathways.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- After the mammoths: The ecological legacy of late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2023Review
- A novel trophic cascade between cougars and feral donkeys shapes desert wetlands.The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Article
- Lost, gained, and regained functional and phylogenetic diversity of European mammals since 8000 years ago.Global change biology · 2022Article
- Misleading estimates of economic impacts of biological invasions: Including the costs but not the benefits.Ambio · 2022Review
- Review
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Large-bodied mammalian herbivores dominated Earth's terrestrial ecosystems for several million years before undergoing substantial extinctions and declines during the Late Pleistocene (LP) due to prehistoric human impacts. The decline of large herbivores led to widespread ecological changes due to the loss of their ecological functions, as driven by their unique combinations of traits. However, recently, humans have significantly increased herbivore species richness through introductions in many parts of the world, potentially counteracting LP losses. Here, we assessed the extent to which introduced herbivore species restore lost-or contribute novel-functions relative to preextinction LP assemblages. We constructed multidimensional trait spaces using a trait database for all extant and extinct mammalian herbivores ≥10 kg known from the earliest LP (∼130,000 ybp) to the present day. Extinction-driven contractions of LP trait space have been offset through introductions by ∼39% globally. Analysis of trait space overlap reveals that assemblages with introduced species are overall more similar to those of the LP than native-only assemblages. This is because 64% of introduced species are more similar to extinct rather than extant species within their respective continents. Many introduced herbivores restore trait combinations that have the capacity to influence ecosystem processes, such as wildfire and shrub expansion in drylands. Although introduced species have long been a source of contention, our findings indicate that they may, in part, restore ecological functions reflective of the past several million years before widespread human-driven extinctions.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.