The Global Extinction Crisis Is Indeed Very Serious

Last week I was surprised to come across a paper published in Nature that claims species extinction rates have been overstated. According to many prominent ecologists, the authors' calculations are outrageous and terribly flawed, but I'm most concerned that their conclusion will be misused by special interest groups and policymakers who want to minimize conservation efforts.

As for the paper itself, Michael Rosenzweig at the University of Arizona makes this analogy in The New York Times:

[The authors] focus was solely on the immediate extinction of endemic species -- an important point for conservation estimates, perhaps, but only part of the story, Rosenzweig said. Endemic extinctions are like money borrowed from a loan shark, but the species-area relationship also describes, say, your car loan and 30-year mortgage, he said.

"In essence, they say if I can estimate the money that I owe the loan sharks, then I can say forget about those mortgage and car payments," Rosenzweig said.

In other words, there's far more to consider in the equation. Over at *National Geographic, *Duke's Stuart Pimm has dissected the paper's conclusion, explaining in detail just how they went wrong:

It took me eight seconds to know the paper was a sham — and I am slow reader. So let me explain why this paper fails so obviously to get at the truth. Along the way, I’ll tell you about those “species-area relationships.”

He goes on to explain that authors He and Hubbell used an extremely simplified version of the species-area relationship, ignoring recent research and making many inaccurate assumptions. Of particular importance:

Wording matters. It always does.

In writing to me about the fuss his paper had caused, author Fangliang He, an ecologist at Sun Yat-sen University in China, said:

“I have followed up some of the media and felt there is a danger of misinterpreting our work, which I would like to clarify here. … All we have said is that the backward SAR is flawed and overestimates extinction rates, not anything more than that.”

Well, of course, that wasn’t what the paper said and it wasn’t what the authors said to the media. If the paper had had “backward SAR” in the title, the media wouldn’t have commented. And one wonders whether Nature would have published it.

I checked the websites that carried this story. Most allow comment, except the ones in China. Professor He had not bothered to provide them with the clarification he provided me.

Go read the entire post and don't believe the hype.