Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2011 Sep 12;366(1577):2451-61.
doi: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0090.

Ecology and evolution of mammalian biodiversity

Kate E Jones  1 , Kamran Safi
Affiliations

Ecology and evolution of mammalian biodiversity

Kate E Jones et al. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. .

Abstract

Mammals have incredible biological diversity, showing extreme flexibility in eco-morphology, physiology, life history and behaviour across their evolutionary history. Undoubtedly, mammals play an important role in ecosystems by providing essential services such as regulating insect populations, seed dispersal and pollination and act as indicators of general ecosystem health. However, the macroecological and macroevolutionary processes underpinning past and present biodiversity patterns are only beginning to be explored on a global scale. It is also particularly important, in the face of the global extinction crisis, to understand these processes in order to be able to use this knowledge to prevent future biodiversity loss and loss of ecosystem services. Unfortunately, efforts to understand mammalian biodiversity have been hampered by a lack of data. New data compilations on current species' distributions, ecologies and evolutionary histories now allow an integrated approach to understand this biodiversity. We review and synthesize these new studies, exploring the past and present ecology and evolution of mammalian biodiversity, and use these findings to speculate about the mammals of our future.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Cumulative number of recognized mammal species (grey dots) since 1758 using data from [15]. The solid line represents the fitted generalized additive model. The dashed line is the projection of the model 50 years into the future (from 2008 onwards). The stars and circles represent model projections for models that were built on subsets of the entire dataset (circles are 10 year projections and stars 25 year projections) to assess how well projections can potentially represent future values (see text). The dotted line represents the linear correlation derived in [2].
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Species richness of all threatened and the most recently discovered 1000 mammals globally, data from [15]. The values on both axes have been standardized between 0 and 1 and binned in 10 equal-sized categories.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Modelling threat status in data-deficient mammal species, data from Schipper et al. [15]. EW, species extinct in the wild; EX, extinct species.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Wilson D. E., Reeder D. M. 2005. Mammal species of the world. A taxonomic and geographic reference. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press
    1. Reeder D. M., Helgen K., Wilson D. E. 2007. Global trends and biases in new mammal species discoveries. Occasional Papers, Museum of Texas Tech. Univ. 269, 1–36
    1. Geissmann T., Lwin N., Aung A. A., Aung T. N., Aung Z. M., Hla T. H., Grindley M., Momberg F. 2011. A new species of snub-nosed monkey, genus Rhinopithecus Milne-Edwards, 1872 (Primates, Colobinae), from Northern Kachin State, Northeastern Myanmar. Am. J. Primatol. 73, 96–107 10.1002/ajp.20894 (doi:10.1002/ajp.20894) - DOI - PubMed
    1. McKenna M. C., Bell S. K. 1997. Classifcation of mammals above the species level. New York, NY: Columbia University Press
    1. Luo Z.-X., Cifelli R. L., Kielan-Jaworowska Z. 2001. Dual origin of tribosphenic mammals. Nature 409, 53–57 10.1038/35051023 (doi:10.1038/35051023) - DOI - PubMed

Publication types