The changing role of mammal life histories in Late Quaternary extinction vulnerability on continents and islands

Abstract

Understanding the drivers of extinction in a human dominated world is important if we are to preserve the remaining biodiversity. We compared extinction events on continents and islands after human arrival in prehistoric and historic times. We used regression trees to examine the role of life history in these extinctions. We found that all extinctions were significantly size-biased except for events on small islands in historic times. Further we found that life history traits associated with a lack of ability to respond quickly to perturbations were good predictors of prehistoric extinctions. In general life history traits were poor predictors of historic extinctions. We conclude that these extinctions are part of one continuous extinction event, but that historic extinctions have multiple drivers, whereas prehistoric extinctions had fewer.