Temporal and sociocultural effects of human colonisation on native biodiversity: filtering and rates of adaptation

Abstract

Modern human societies have negatively impacted native species richness and their adaptive capacity on every continent, in clearly contrasting ways. We propose a general model to explain how the sequence, duration and type of colonising society alter native species richness patterns through changes in evolutionary pressures. These changes cause different ‘filtering effects' on native species, while simultaneously altering the capacity of surviving species to adapt to further anthropogenic pressures. This framework may better explain the observed native species extinction rates and extirpation legacies following human colonisation events, as well as better predict future patterns of human impact on biodiversity.

Building references for nature conservation

“…Recent research further indicates that human land use prior to the 20th century was spatially and temporally heterogeneous, such that locally strong influences did not necessarily scale up to the regional level (Roos et al., 2022)⁠. Thus, depending on the spatial and time scale of the considered baseline, conservation references can correspond to environments strongly degraded by recent high‐intensity economies, to biodiverse cultural landscapes shaped and sustained by prior societies, or to prehuman environments (Amiot et al., 2021; Ellis et al., 2021)⁠.…”