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We are currently in the midst of Earth's sixth mass extinction event and it's accelerating. Both are somewhat common in terms of their total numbers, he said, but their decline is troubling in some places. "And if you look at what's happened in the last decade, we have been culling their numbers so fast that if we kept up with that pace, there would be no more wild elephants in Africa in 20 years.". "These results show it is time to act. Updated 1029 GMT (1829 HKT) July 11, 2017. The sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth is accelerating, according to an analysis by scientists who warn it may be a tipping point for the collapse of civilisation. Humanity needs the life support of a relatively stable climate, flows of fresh water, agricultural pest and disease-vector control, pollination for crops, and so on, all provided by functional ecosystems.”. Its value, Barnosky said, is that it makes visible a phenomenon typically unseen by scientists and the public: that even populations of relatively common species are crashing. Ceballos' paper highlights the urgency of this crisis -- and the need for change. We examine 29,400 species of terrestrial vertebrates, and determine which are on the brink of extinction because they have fewer than 1,000 individuals. More than 500 species of land animals were found to be on the brink of extinction and likely to be lost within 20 years. But given there's a problem, what the bloody hell are we going to do about it?". Let me explain. “Action is important for many reasons, not least of which is that directly and indirectly we rely on the rest of life on Earth for our own health and wellbeing,” she said. That's terrifying, especially since humans are contributing to this shift. Analysis shows 500 species on brink of extinction – as many as were lost over previous century, Last modified on Mon 1 Jun 2020 20.37 BST. Prof Georgina Mace, of University College London, said: “This new analysis re-emphasises some startling facts about the extent to which vertebrate populations have been reduced worldwide by human activities.” But she said she was not convinced that simply having a population less than 1,000 was the best measure of a species being on the brink. The Holocene extinction is the sixth mass extinction event in Earth's 4.5-billion-year history. Consider the African elephant. They have almost all occurred since our ancestors developed agriculture, some 11,000 y ago. But on the speculative sixth mass extinction, he was more forthcoming. Scientists discovered that 388 species of land vertebrate had populations under 5,000, and the vast majority (84%) lived in the same regions as the species with populations under 1,000, creating the conditions for a domino effect. Barn swallows and jaguars are two other examples, according to Ceballos, the lead author of the paper. Except this time, we have no one but ourselves to blame. Known examples of this include the overhunting of sea otters, the main predator of kelp-eating sea urchins. The recent United Nations report on biodiversity and ecosystem services estimates that a quarter of all species face extinction, many within decades. These events are known as the Big Five mass extinctions, and all signs suggest we are now on the precipice of a sixth. “The ongoing sixth mass species extinction is the result of the destruction of component populations leading to eventual extirpation of entire species. But that's not even the full picture of the "biological annihilation" people are inflicting on the natural world, according to.

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