Extinction Rates

As the need increases for sound estimates of impending rates of animal and plant species extinction, scientists must have a firm grounding in the qualitative and quantitative methods required to make the best possible predictions. Extinction Rates offers the most wide-ranging and practical introduction to those methods available. With contributions from an international cast of leading experts, the book combines cutting-edge information on recent and past extinction rates with treatments of underlying ecological and evolutionary causes. Throughout, it highlights apparent differences in extinction rates among taxonomic groups and places, aiming to identify unresolved issues and important questions. Written with advanced undergraduate and graduate students in mind, Extinction Rates will also prove invaluable to researchers in ecology, conservation biology, and the earth and environmental sciences.

This useful new book answers the need for data-driven estimates of recent (1600 onwards) extinction rates as a basis for more accurate projections of extinction rates for the centuries to come. This book provides a more wide-ranging and data-driven treatment of present and likely future rates of extinction than any text currently available. It is directed broadly at senior undergraduates, postgraduate students and research workers in the fields of ecology, conservation biology and the environmental sciences. The authors highlight apparent differences in extinction rates among taxonomic groups and places, aiming to identify unresolved issues and important questions.

1 - Assessing extinction rates
2 - Extinctions in the fossil record
3 - Constancy and change of life in the sea
4 - Insect faunas in ice age environments: why so little extinction?
5 - Bird extinctions in the Central Pacific
6 - Extinctions in Mediterranean areas
7 - Recent past and future extinctions in birds
8 - Rates and patterns of extinction among British invertebrates
9 - Assessing the risk of plant extinction due to pollinator and disperser failure
10 - Population dynamic principles
11 - Estimating extinction from molecular phylogenies
12 - Biological models for monitoring species decline: the construction and use of databases
13 - Classification of species and its role in conservation planning
14 - The scale of the human enterprise and biodiversity loss