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Thursday, May 26, 2011

Extinction forecasts may have been overstated

Many ecologists agree that humanity has contributed to extinction through destruction of natural habitats, but a controversial study published in Nature magazine suggests "scientists have made a fundamental mistake in how they reverse-engineer this law, known as the species-area relationship, to extinction estimates," Greenwire reports for The New York Times. This may mean extinction estimates could have bene overstated by double or more.

"This is welcome news in that we have bought a little time for saving species," Stephen Hubbell, ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles and co-author of the study, told Voosen. "But we have to redo a whole lot of research that was done incorrectly."

"Stuart Pimm, ecologist at Duke University and Michael Rosenzweig, ecologist at the University of Arizona, question the paper's evidence and conclusions, saying that while the researchers "raise an important theoretical point for estimating extinctions -- a notion echoed by several other ecologists -- they do not shake the foundations of ecology," Voosen writes. (Read more)

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