ArticleScience advances2020
The past and future human impact on mammalian diversity.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Diversity and transmission and zoonotic potential of microbes in true insectivores.Nature communications · 2025Pooled it
- Ghost in the Prairie: Using Community Science and MaxEnt to Model the Habitat of a Rare Mesopredator.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Evolutionary Footprint: A Systemic Indicator in Evolution, Ecology and Conservation.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- A comprehensive dated phylogeny of China's vascular plants reveals a hidden global biodiversity hotspot.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Revaluation of the genetic diversity-area relationship by integrating nucleotide and haplotype diversity.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Anthropocene Imperilment of Ancient Diversity and Evolutionary Potential in Terrestrial Vertebrates.Research square · 2025Article
- Sports in Natural Forests: A Systematic Review of Environmental Impact and Compatibility for Readability.Sports (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Temperate forest plants are associated with heterogeneous semi-open canopy conditions shaped by large herbivores.Nature plants · 2025Article
- Human-bat contacts in the Netherlands, and potential risks for virus exchange.One health outlook · 2025Article
- Patterns of late Holocene and historical extinctions on Madagascar.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2025Review
- Article
- African bat database: curated data of occurrences, distributions and conservation metrics for sub-Saharan bats.Scientific data · 2024Article
- A reference genome for the Harpy Eagle reveals steady demographic decline and chromosomal rearrangements in the origin of Accipitriformes.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Reliable biogeography requires fossils: insights from a new species-level phylogeny of extinct and living carnivores.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Trait-mediated speciation and human-driven extinctions in proboscideans revealed by unsupervised Bayesian neural networks.Science advances · 2024Article
- Modelling reveals the effect of climate and land use change on Madagascar's chameleons fauna.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Diversity and distribution of bamboo-feeding true bugs in China.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Density of a cryptic Australian small mammal: The threatened Julia Creek dunnart (Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- DeepDive: estimating global biodiversity patterns through time using deep learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Geographic differences in body size distributions underlie food web connectance of tropical forest mammals.Scientific reports · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To understand the current biodiversity crisis, it is crucial to determine how humans have affected biodiversity in the past. However, the extent of human involvement in species extinctions from the Late Pleistocene onward remains contentious. Here, we apply Bayesian models to the fossil record to estimate how mammalian extinction rates have changed over the past 126,000 years, inferring specific times of rate increases. We specifically test the hypothesis of human-caused extinctions by using posterior predictive methods. We find that human population size is able to predict past extinctions with 96% accuracy. Predictors based on past climate, in contrast, perform no better than expected by chance, suggesting that climate had a negligible impact on global mammal extinctions. Based on current trends, we predict for the near future a rate escalation of unprecedented magnitude. Our results provide a comprehensive assessment of the human impact on past and predicted future extinctions of mammals.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.