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New research from the University of St Andrews has shown that higher extinction risk is associated with higher frequency of decreasing local prevalence of species, in an analysis of one of the most comprehensive long-term databases ever created, BioTIME – a major tool to study biodiversity change also developed at the University of St Andrews.
Published today (23 June) in Nature Communications, researchers from the School of Biology alongside a team of international partners, analysed over 60 000 populations of 2362 species across 978 marine and terrestrial assemblages. These populations have been sampled comprehensively over at least 20 years.
An assemblage refers to a group of species from the same taxonomic group that co-occur within the same geographic location and time period, such as, a bird or fish assemblage. Analysing assemblage-level data allows us to systematically quantify change over time for many species and populations, and identify which ones might be faring better, i.e. assessing the “winners and losers” amidst ongoing global change.
The analysis matched each population’s temporal prevalence trend with each species’ extinction risk from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. The picture that emerged was of complex links between the two factors, but a clear signal also emerged that decreasing temporal trends were associated with higher extinction risk compared to the other trends. Overall, fewer than 10% of populations showed either increasing or decreasing prevalence over time
