The DOI matches its Crossref record; 51 of the 51 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Extinction risk is most acute for the world’s largest and smallest vertebrates
Open accessAbstract
Significance: Determining the drivers of extinction risk has been a key pursuit of conservation biology. Considering that body mass could be a strong predictor of extinction risk, we constructed a global database of body masses for 27,647 vertebrate species. Results show that the smallest- and largest-bodied vertebrates have elevated extinction risk. The largest vertebrates are mostly threatened by direct killing by humans, whereas the smallest species are more likely to have restricted geographic ranges—an important predictor of extinction risk—and be threatened by habitat degradation. Declines of large and small vertebrate species will truncate the size distributions characterizing these taxa, jeopardizing ecosystem services to humans, and generating cascading ecological and evolutionary effects on other species and processes.
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Citations
Cites
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BackgroundHas the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?
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BackgroundTrophic Downgrading of Planet Earth
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Cited by
A review of the relation between species traits and extinction risk
Chichorro, F., Juslén, A., & Cardoso, P. (2019) · Biological Conservation · doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2019.07.001 · Cited by 396
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Herbivores at the highest risk of extinction among mammals, birds, and reptiles
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Self-citationCryptic species conservation: a review
Hending, D. (2025) · Biological Reviews · doi:10.1111/brv.13139 · Cited by 113
Metadata
- Authors
- Ripple, W. J., Wolf, C., Newsome, T. M., Hoffmann, M., Wirsing, A. J., & McCauley, D. J.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2017-09-18
- Volume
- 114
- Issue
- 40
- Pages
- 10678-10683
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W2754584182
- Cited by
- 401
- References
- 51
- FWCI
- 22.13
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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- Ripple, W. J., Wolf, C., Newsome, T. M., Hoffmann, M., Wirsing, A. J., & McCauley, D. J. (2017). Extinction risk is most acute for the world’s largest and smallest vertebrates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1702078114
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.