Human impacts on the rates of recent, present, and future bird extinctions

Pimm, Stuart; Raven, Peter; Peterson, Alan; Şekercioğlu, Çağan H.; Ehrlich, Paul R.

doi:10.1073/pnas.0604181103

Human impacts on the rates of recent, present, and future bird extinctions

Unqualified, the statement that ≈1.3% of the ≈10,000 presently known bird species have become extinct since A.D. 1500 yields an estimate of ≈26 extinctions per million species per year (or 26 E/MSY). This is higher than the benchmark rate of ≈1 E/MSY before human impacts, but is a serious underes…