Predictive frameworks of climate change extinction risk generally focus on the magnitude of climate change a species is expected to experience and the potential for that species to track suitable climate. A species' risk of extinction from climate change will depend, in part, on the magnitude of climate change the species experiences, its exposure. However, exposure is only one component of ris...

Investigating how species coped with past environmental changes informs how modern species might face human-induced global changes, notably via the study of historical extinction, a dominant feature that has shaped current biodiversity patterns. The genus Bombus, which comprises 250 mostly cold-adapted species, is an iconic insect group sensitive to current global changes. Through a combination...

The cause of the end-Cretaceous (KPg) mass extinction is still debated due to difficulty separating the influences of two closely timed potential causal events: eruption of the Deccan Traps volcanic province and impact of the Chicxulub meteorite. Here we combine published extinction patterns with a new clumped isotope temperature record from a hiatus-free, expanded KPg boundary section from Sey...

M any species face uncertain fates under climate change. Some will persist by shifting their range or adapting to local conditions, whereas others will be lost to extinction. Efforts to lessen the impacts of climate change on biodiversity depend on accurate forecasts. Most studies aiming to identify likely winners and losers consider species one at a time with a “climate envelope” approach that...

With rapidly increasing rates of contemporary extinction, predicting extinction vulnerability and identifying how multiple stressors drive non-random species loss have become key challenges in ecology. These assessments are crucial for avoiding the loss of key functional groups that sustain ecosystem processes and services. We developed a novel predictive framework of species extinction vulnera...

The end-Triassic extinction is one of the Phanerozoic's largest mass extinctions. This extinction is typically attributed to climate change associated with degassing of basalt flows from the central Atlantic magmatic province (CAMP). However, recent work suggests that the earliest known CAMP basalts occur above the extinction horizon and that climatic and biotic changes began before the earlies...

The Late Ordovician mass extinction (LOME) coincided with dramatic climate changes, but there are numerous ways in which these changes could have driven marine extinctions. We use a palaeobiogeographic database of rhynchonelliform brachiopods to examine the selectivity of Late Ordovician-Early Silurian genus extinctions and evaluate which extinction drivers are best supported by the data. The f...

Kalinkat et al. (1) discuss the biodiversity crisis in their reply to our article “Extinction risk is most acute for the world’s largest and smallest vertebrates” (2). We agree with Kalinkat et al. (1) that small freshwater species tend to have elevated extinction risk, an issue that we highlight in our paper (2). Specifically, 41% (36 of 87) of freshwater vertebrate species with body masses ≤ ...

Food-web perturbations stemming from climate change, overexploitation, invasive species and habitat degradation often cause an initial loss of species that results in a cascade of secondary extinctions, posing considerable challenges to ecosystem conservation efforts. Here, we devise a systematic network-based approach to reduce the number of secondary extinctions using a predictive modelling f...

Australia has been cited as a weak link in anthropogenic models of megafauna extinction, but recent work suggests instead that the evidence for rapid extinction shortly after human arrival is robust. The global model is revisited, based on the contention that late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions took place rapidly on islands, and some islands (such as Australia and the Americas) are much larg...