• 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.

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      #effondrement #collapsologie #catastrophe #fin_du_monde #it_has_begun #Anthropocène #capitalocène