Predicting how populations decline to extinction

Abstract

Global species extinction typically represents the endpoint in a long sequence of population declines and local extinctions. In comparative studies of extinction risk of contemporary mammalian species, there appear to be some universal traits that may predispose taxa to an elevated risk of extinction. In local population-level studies, there are limited insights into the process of population decline and extinction. Moreover, there is still little appreciation of how local processes scale up to global patterns. Advancing the understanding of factors which predispose populations to rapid declines will benefit proactive conservation and may allow us to target at-risk populations as well as at-risk species. Here, we take mammalian population trend data from the largest repository of population abundance trends, and combine it with the PanTHERIA database on mammal traits to answer the question: what factors can be used to predict decline in mammalian abundance? We find in general that environmental variables are better determinants of cross-species population-level decline than intrinsic biological traits. For effective conservation, we must not only describe which species are at risk and why, but also prescribe ways to counteract this.

Figure 1.

Global patterns of species and population-level decline in mammals for (a) species flagged as declining (IUCN), (b) species that have declining total population trend, (c) species flagged as stable (IUCN), (d) species that have stable total population trend, (e) species flagged as increasing (IUCN), (f) species that have increasing total population trend, (g) species flagged as unknown (IUCN). Dark colours are accumulations of high numbers of species and light colours denote low numbers of species.