By Laura Geggel 25 July 2015 (LiveScience) – The mighty megafauna of the last ice age, including the wooly mammoths, short-faced bears and cave lions, largely went extinct because of rapid climate-warming events, a new study finds. During the unstable climate of the Late Pleistocene, about 60,000 to 12,000 years ago, abrupt climate spikes, called […]
By James Hataway14 July 2015 Athens, Georgia (UGA) – Unless humans slow the destruction of Earth’s declining supply of plant life, civilization like it is now may become completely unsustainable, according to a paper published recently by University of Georgia researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “You can think of the […]
By James Dyke19 June 2015 (The Conversation) – We are currently witnessing the start of a mass extinction event the likes of which have not been seen on Earth for at least 65 million years. This is the alarming finding of a new study published in the journal Science Advances. The research was designed to […]
By Geena Fowles4 May 2015 (America Herald) – A massive 16 percent of our planet’s species may be facing extinction by 2100 as a result of the havoc that climate change is wreaking, a recent study published in Science states. According to a team of researchers, the ever-increasing temperatures will contribute to the wipe-out of […]
By Will Dunham; Editing by Mohammad Zargham9 April 2015 WASHINGTON (Reuters) – It is one of science’s enduring mysteries: what caused the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history. And, no, it is not the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Scientists said on Thursday that huge amounts of carbon dioxide spewed from colossal volcanic eruptions […]
2013: Formosan Clouded Leopard, Neofelis nebulosa brachyura By Mitchell Friedman16 September 2014 (Pixable) – The number of extinct animals is difficult to calculate and always higher than the estimate. In some cases, a species is presumed extinct — none have been seen in years — but it’s yet to receive official extinction status by the […]
10 February 2015 (Conservation Letters) – Drivers of declines in status for pollinator birds (1988-2012) and mammals (1996-2008). ABSTRACT: Biodiversity is declining, with direct and indirect effects on ecosystem functions and services that are poorly quantified. Here we develop the first global assessment of trends in pollinators, focusing on pollinating birds and mammals. A Red […]
10 February 2015 (Conservation Letters) – Red List Indices for (a) pollinating and non-pollinating bird species; (b) pollinating and non-pollinating mammal species; and (c) aggregated pollinating and non-pollinating birds and mammals. An RLI value of 1 equates to all species being Least Concern; an RLI value of 0 equates to all species being Extinct. Improvements […]
(The Misanthropocene) – […] We know more and more in deeper and deeper ways just how screwed we are ecologically. And yet we continue on, dig our heels in and argue that at least some human comfort is reasonable while we watch the world burn. Right? But we’re killing ourselves off in other ways, too. […]
By Matt Walker4 March 2015 (BBC News) – Around the world, animals that pollinate flowering plants are in decline. An increasing number of pollinating mammal and bird species are moving towards extinction, according to the first study of its kind. Other, so far unpublished studies, also suggest that pollinating insect species are also heading towards […]
