ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
The decline of mammal functional and evolutionary diversity worldwide.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Functional Diversity Responses to Temperature Vary Spatially and With Protection Status in Wintering Waterbird Assemblages.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Ghost in the Prairie: Using Community Science and MaxEnt to Model the Habitat of a Rare Mesopredator.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Forest Conversion Drives Divergent Responses in Bird and Mammal Diversity: Stand Structure Matters for Birds, Elevation for Mammals.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Can a Top Predator Persist After One of the World's Largest Mining Dam Failures? Occupancy Dynamics of the Neotropical Otter in Brazil's Paraopeba River.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Food Web Similarity Increases With Productivity Similarity at a Continental Scale.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Phylogenetic and Functional Biogeographic Approach for Rodent Conservation Across an Environmental Gradient in Chile.Journal of biogeography · 2025Article
- Role of protected areas in mitigating range loss and local extinctions of terrestrial mammals.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Extinction threatens to cause morphological and ecological homogenization in sharks.Science advances · 2025Article
- Lost giants, lost functions: palaeodietary insights into the ecological niches of Pleistocene ground sloths.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Threat reduction must be coupled with targeted recovery programmes to conserve global bird diversity.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Changes in community composition and functional diversity of European bats under climate change.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- European mammal turnover driven by a global rapid warming event preceding the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Synergistic and Additive Effects of Multiple Threats Erode Phylogenetic and Life History Strategy Diversity in Testudines and Crocodilia.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Global hotspots of butterfly diversity are threatened in a warming world.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Reconstructing the degree of mammal defaunation throughout the Caatinga - the largest dry tropical forest region of South America.PloS one · 2025Article
- Convergent relaxation of molecular constraint in herbivores reveals the changing role of liver and kidney functions across mammalian diets.Genome research · 2024Article
- Toward a comparative framework for studies of altitudinal migration.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Ecological function maintained despite mesomammal declines.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Spatio-temporal metapopulation trends: The coconut crabs of Zanzibar.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biodiversity is declining worldwide. Because species interact with one another and with their environment, losses of particular organisms alter the function of ecosystems. Our understanding of the global rates and specific causes of functional decline remains limited, however. Species losses also reduce the cumulative amount of extant evolutionary history ("phylogenetic diversity" [PD]) in communities-our biodiversity heritage. Here we provide a global assessment of how each known anthropogenic threat is driving declines in functional diversity (FD) and PD, using terrestrial mammals as a case study. We find that habitat loss and harvest (e.g., legal hunting, poaching, snaring) are by far the biggest drivers of ongoing FD and PD loss. Declines in FD in high-biodiversity countries, particularly in Southeast Asia and South America, are greater than would be expected if species losses were random with respect to ecological function. Among functional guilds, herbivores are disproportionately likely to be declining from harvest, with important implications for plant communities and nutrient cycling. Frugivores are particularly likely to be declining from both harvest and habitat loss, with potential ramifications for seed dispersal and even forest carbon storage. Globally, phylogenetically unique species do not have an elevated risk of decline, but in areas such as Australia and parts of Southeast Asia, both habitat loss and harvest are biased toward phylogenetically unique species. Enhanced conservation efforts, including a renewed focus on harvest sustainability, are urgently needed to prevent the deterioration of ecosystem function, especially in the South American and equatorial Asian tropics.
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