More Taxonomists Describing Significantly Fewer Species per Unit Effort May Indicate That Most Species Have Been Discovered

Costello, Mark J.; Wilson, Simon; Houlding, Brett

doi:10.1093/sysbio/syt024

Cited by 100 publications

(78 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Steffen et al (2015) retain the average number of extinctions per million species-years (E/MSY) as a proxy for measuring genetic diversity loss, although it is criticized for being difficult to measure and inevitably has a time-lag. Recent estimates suggest that there are likely to be ~5±3 million species on Earth and some current models predict extinction rates of less than 5% per decade, although the impact of climate change on extinctions is particularly uncertain (Costello et al 2013). Although 5% per decade does not sound catastrophic, Steffen et al (2015) suggest an "aspirational" PB of 1 E/MSY and a more realistic one of 10 E/MSY.…”

Section: Change In Biosphere Integritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries

Campbell¹,

Beare²,

Bennett³

et al. 2017

E&S

777

399

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. 2017. Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries. ABSTRACT. We explore the role of agriculture in destabilizing the Earth system at the planetary scale, through examining nine planetary boundaries, or "safe limits": land-system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, biosphere integrity, climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, and introduction of novel entities. Two planetary boundaries have been fully transgressed, i.e., are at high risk, biosphere integrity and biogeochemical flows, and agriculture has been the major driver of the transgression. Three are in a zone of uncertainty i.e., at increasing risk, with agriculture the major driver of two of those, landsystem change and freshwater use, and a significant contributor to the third, climate change. Agriculture is also a significant or major contributor to change for many of those planetary boundaries still in the safe zone. To reduce the role of agriculture in transgressing planetary boundaries, many interventions will be needed, including those in broader food systems.

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Section: Change In Biosphere Integritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries

Campbell¹,

Beare²,

Bennett³

et al. 2017

E&S

777

399

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“…However, the "et al" effect only appeared in the 1980s when this trend was already under way, and two independent analyses showed it did not significantly alter the trend (8,22). Moreover, the data show no indications of relatively more "part-timers," whether measured as the proportion of authors who described one or more species per decade for the past century, the average duration of authors' publication lives, or the skewness of the relative number of species per author over time [reviewed in (21)]. The number of authors of new species has increased most in Asia and South America and represents a younger generation employed in universities (23).…”

Section: Higher Taxonomic Groupmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A series of studies on fossils, regional and global fauna and flora, all marine species, and all algae have shown that several times as many people have been describing species as ever before (9,20,21). Critics may counter that this reflects a new fashion to put more people's names against a new species (the "et al" effect) and that there is a greater proportion of people describing new species part-time.…”

Section: Higher Taxonomic Groupmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The rate of marine species descriptions has been relatively higher than for terrestrial since the 1950s, reflecting the new capabilities to explore the ocean. It has generally taken twice as many authors to name marine species compared with terrestrial species over time (21). However, the greatest period of terrestrial and overall species discovery was 100 years ago (9), and there has been a significant decline in the number of species described new to science overall per author since then (21).…”

Section: Higher Taxonomic Groupmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Response to Comments on “Can We Name Earth’s Species Before They Go Extinct?”

Costello

May

Stork

2013

Science

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Mora et al. disputed that most species will be discovered before they go extinct, but not our main recommendations to accelerate species' discoveries. We show that our conclusions would be unaltered by discoveries of more microscopic species and reinforce our estimates of species description and extinction rates, that taxonomic effort has never been greater, and that there are 2 to 8 million species on Earth.

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“…The discussion about the actual number of species also evoked controversy whether there are fewer or more taxonomists as compared to previous decades (Costello et al 2013a(Costello et al , 2013b(Costello et al , 2014, tightly linked to the term taxonomic impediment (Crozier 1997;Khuroo et al 2007). What seems to be common sense is (i) millions of species remain undescribed, which means hypotheses about interactions on ecosystem-level based on few indicator species might be problematic (Gerlach et al 2013;Macher et al 2016), also due to misidentifications (Birk et al 2012;Balvanera et al 2014); (ii) species determination using exclusively morphological characters is often timeconsuming, cost-intensive, and too often relies on scarce taxonomic expertise gained only through years of training (Frobel and Schlumprecht 2014); (iii) the current rate of species extinction far exceeds the background rate (Pimm et al 2014), and climate displacement puts additional pressure on many species (Keith et al 2014); (iv) technological advancements exist that could counteract the consequences arising from (i) and (ii) (Scheffers et al 2012;Hebert et al 2003a).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to tackle the molecular species inventory for an industrialized nation—lessons from the first phase of the German Barcode of Life initiative GBOL (2012–2015)

Geiger

Astrin

Borsch

et al. 2016

Genome

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Biodiversity loss is mainly driven by human activity. While concern grows over the fate of hot spots of biodiversity, contemporary species losses still prevail in industrialized nations. Therefore, strategies were formulated to halt or reverse the loss, driven by evidence for its value for ecosystem services. Maintenance of the latter through conservation depends on correctly identified species. To this aim, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding the GBOL project, a consortium of natural history collections, botanic gardens, and universities working on a barcode reference database for the country's fauna and flora. Several noticeable findings could be useful for future campaigns: (i) validating taxon lists to serve as a taxonomic backbone is time-consuming, but without alternative; (ii) offering financial incentives to taxonomic experts, often citizen scientists, is indispensable; (iii) completion of the libraries for widespread species enables analyses of environmental samples, but the process may not hold pace with technological advancements; (iv) discoveries of new species are among the best stories for the media; (v) a commitment to common data standards and repositories is needed, as well as transboundary cooperation between nations; (vi) after validation, all data should be published online via the BOLD to make them searchable for external users and to allow cross-checking with data from other countries.Key words: biodiversity assessment, citizen science, DNA barcoding, reference library, Germany.Résumé : La perte de biodiversité découle principalement de l'activité humaine. Tandis que les inquiétudes grandissent sur le sort des milieux à forte biodiversité, la disparition d'espèces contemporaines a toujours cours dans les pays industrialisés. Ainsi, des stratégies ont été proposées pour arrêter ou renverser ces pertes d'espèces, lesquelles interventions sont motivées par la valeur de la biodiversité en matière de services écosystémiques. Le maintien de ces services par le biais de la conservation dépend d'une identification correcte des espèces. C'est dans ce but que le Ministère fédéral de l'éducation et de la recherche de l'Allemagne a financé le projet GBOL, un consortium de collections d'histoire naturelle, de jardins botaniques et d'universités oeuvrant à développer une

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More Taxonomists Describing Significantly Fewer Species per Unit Effort May Indicate That Most Species Have Been Discovered

Cited by 100 publications

References 25 publications

Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries

Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries

Response to Comments on “Can We Name Earth’s Species Before They Go Extinct?”

How to tackle the molecular species inventory for an industrialized nation—lessons from the first phase of the German Barcode of Life initiative GBOL (2012–2015)

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