Hidden Assumption Inflates Species-Loss Predictions

By Virginia Gewin of Nature magazine A massive extinction resulting from habitat loss is under way–but perhaps not as rapidly as is often predicted. A paper published today in Nature explains why past predictions of extinction rates–for example, a 1980 US National Research Council report predicting losses of millions of species by the year 2000–have not been realized. “We have mathematically proven why these 'guesstimates' are flawed,” says Fangliang He, an ecologist currently at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and a co-author of the latest study

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Hidden Assumption Inflates Species-Loss Predictions