Article original:
Mammal diversity will take millions of years to recover from the current biodiversity crisis.
Matt Davis, Søren Faurby, Jens-Christian Svenning.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, le 15 octobre 2018
►https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1804906115
Le dernier paragraphe de l’article:
The results reported here show that it is unlikely that mam-
mals can evolve fast enough to restore their lost PD on any kind
of time scale relevant to humans. Just the PD that mammals are
expected to lose in the next few decades would realistically take
millions of years to recover (SI Appendix, Fig. S8). Even after this
PD recovery, FD (SI Appendix, Fig. S9) would likely remain
highly altered for millions of years more. The lost evolutionary
history from previous and ongoing extinctions is already affecting
ecosystems (42), a trend that will likely only get worse. If any-
thing, our grim predictions of long recovery times are conser-
vative. Unlike our best-case scenario model, there is little reason
to expect that humans will be able to bring extinction rates down
to background levels within the next century with a rising human
population and increasing anthropogenic climate change. The
only real option to speed PD recovery is to save unique evolu-
tionary history before it is already lost. In addition to increasing
overall conservation efforts, we should use available PD methods
to prioritize action for evolutionarily distinct species and dedi-
cate more research to exploring PD’s relationship with FD and
ecosystem services (4, 7). If we could momentarily stop extinc-
tions for mammals, we would save as much evolutionary history
in the next 100 y as what our ancestors lost in the last 100,000 y
(SI Appendix, Table S1). Extinction is part of evolution, but the
unnatural rapidity of current species losses forces us to address
whether we are cutting off twigs or whole branches from the tree
of life.
On l’ajoute à la troisième compilation :
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#effondrement #collapsologie #catastrophe #fin_du_monde #it_has_begun #Anthropocène #capitalocène