Unpacking the extinction crisis: rates, patterns and causes of recent extinctions in plants and animals
Abstract
Biodiversity loss is one of the greatest challenges facing Earth today. The most direct information on species losses comes from recent extinctions. However, our understanding of these recent, human-related extinctions is incomplete across life, especially their causes and their rates and patterns among clades, across habitats and over time. Furthermore, prominent studies have extrapolated from these extinctions to suggest a current mass extinction event. Such extrapolations assume that recent extinctions predict current extinction risk and are homogeneous among groups, over time and among environments. Here, we analyse rates and patterns of recent extinctions (last 500 years). Surprisingly, past extinctions did not strongly predict current risk among groups. Extinctions varied strongly among groups, and were most frequent among molluscs and some tetrapods, and relatively rare in plants and arthropods. Extinction rates have increased over the last five centuries, but generally declined in the last 100 years. Recent extinctions were predominantly on islands, whereas the majority of non-island extinctions were in freshwater. Island extinctions were most frequently related to invasive species, but habitat loss was the most important cause (and current threat) in continental regions. Overall, we identify the major patterns in recent extinctions but caution against extrapolating them into the future.
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And from the University of Arizona, Oct. 22, 2025:
Prominent research studies have suggested that our planet is currently experiencing another mass extinction, based on extrapolating extinctions from the past 500 years into the future and the idea that extinction rates are rapidly accelerating.
A new study by Kristen Saban and John Wiens with the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, however, revealed that over the last 500 years extinctions in plants, arthropods and land vertebrates peaked about 100 years ago and have declined since then. Furthermore, the researchers found that the past extinctions underlying these forecasts were mostly caused by invasive species on islands and are not the most important current threat, which is the destruction of natural habitats.
The paper argues that claims of a current mass extinction may rest on shaky assumptions when projecting data from past extinctions into the future, ignoring differences in factors driving extinctions in the past, the present and the future. Published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, the paper is the first study to analyze rates, patterns and causes of recent extinctions across plant and animal species.
For their study, Saban and Wiens analyzed rates and patterns of recent extinctions, specifically across 912 species of plants and animals that went extinct over the past 500 years. All in all, data from almost 2 million species were included in the analysis.
"We discovered that the causes of those recent extinctions were very different from the threats species are currently facing," said Wiens, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. "This makes it problematic to extrapolate these past extinction patterns into the future, because the drivers are rapidly changing, particularly with respect to habitat loss and climate change."
According to Saban and Wiens, the most direct information on species losses comes from recent extinctions over the past five centuries. However, studies extrapolating these patterns into the future generally assume that recent extinctions predict current extinction risk and are homogeneous among groups, over time and among environments, the authors argue.
"To our surprise, past extinctions are weak and unreliable predictors of the current risk that any given group of animals or plants is facing," said lead author Saban, who recently graduated from the U of A and is currently a doctoral student at Harvard University.
Extinction rates varied strongly among groups, and extinctions were most frequent among mollusks, such as snails and mussels, and vertebrates, but relatively rare among plants and arthropods. Most extinctions were of species that were confined to isolated islands, like the Hawaiian Islands. On continents, most extinctions were in freshwater habitats. Island extinctions were most frequently related to invasive species, but habitat loss was the most important cause (and current threat) in continental regions. Many species appeared to go extinct on islands because of predators and competitors brought by humans, such as rats, pigs and goats.
Somewhat unexpectedly, the researchers found that in the last 200 years, there was no evidence for increasing extinction from climate change.
"That does not mean that climate change is not a threat," Wiens said. "It just means that past extinctions do not reflect current and future threats."
The authors also considered threat levels – for example "threatened," "endangered" or "least concern," – for 163,000 species as assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
"The current threat level provides probably our best hint of what is currently happening and might happen in the near future," Wiens said. "We found the patterns of today's threats to be different from those of past extinctions. For example, most extinct species are mollusks and vertebrates on islands that were driven extinct by invasive species, but most threatened species today are mainland species facing habitat destruction."
Saban said she doesn't want the study "to be taken as giving people a carte blanche" to suggest that human activity does not present a significant and urgent threat to many species....
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*I joke because back during the covid time, when many of the scientific journals straight-up disgraced themselves the publications of the Royal Society got an appreciative nod.
Here are the intro to and outro from March 2023's "Covid-19: The Betrayal of Science By The Science Journals"
Only rarely will you see anything from The Lancet on our pages. Because of their history of politicization of reports they just can't be trusted. From a 2021 post:
We so prefer the British Medical Journal to the Lancet that we almost never link to the Lancet.
Starting with the 1998 vaccine/autism paper, to the fact it took the Lancet 12 years to retract it, to the two Iraq death toll papers, papers based on models that were refuted with the simple question: Where are the bodies?, to the fraudulent hydroxychloriquine paper (and retraction) used by the WHO to halt clinical trials, to the letter published by the Lancet organized by Daszak stating the Wuhan Institute of Virology could not have been the source of WuFlu (with 26 of the 27 co-signers having undisclosed connections to the Wuhan Institute), and three or four more instances that have slipped my memory at the moment.
The TL;dr is, sadly, after all these years, you can't trust the Lancet....
*****
And skipping past the (very informative) linked article:
....So, if we can't trust Nature, or Science, what are we left with?
The BMJ, who disemboweled Facebook's so called fact-checkers? I rather enjoyed reading those stories.
The New England Journal of Medicine?
The journal Cell is supposed to be pretty good.
Proceedings of The Royal Society A and B? With the departure of Sir Paul Nurse as President of The Royal Society the journals seem to be tacking back closer to what can be found from the Presidencies of Pepys, Wren and Newton in The Philosophical Transactions.
Digitized Minutes of the Royal Society 1686 - 1711"Royal Society opens archive, kills productivity" (Newton's First Published Paper; Franklin and the Kite, etc.)
As noted in May 2020's "NASA detects evidence of parallel universe that's probably better than the one we're in":
*The currently most popular paper at Proceedings A is "A contribution to the mathematical theory of epidemics" Published:01 August 1927
There is also Proceedings B which was split off from what hat just been Proceedings of the Royal Society early in the last century to cover biology in its own journal and where the currently most popular paper is "A 250-year index of first flowering dates and its response to temperature changes
(Published 07 April 2010) and just for grins and giggle here's an early
report on global warming's impact on the Arctic via the Minutes of
Council:
"It will without doubt have come to your Lordship's knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations."
There is also Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society whose back issues start in 1665.—President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817
President of the Royal Society, Minutes of Council, Volume 8. pp.149-153, Royal Society, London.
20th November, 1817.
So who knows, maybe it's time for a new journal.
If interested see also January 2020's: "Is the Modern Mass Extinction Overrated?":
I'm not sure overrated is the word I'd choose but once in a while you have to accentuate the positive or the dour and the dire starts eating at your brain. Seriously....