Rikki Gumbs

Feb 29, 2024 | nature.com | Rikki Gumbs |Ryan Bates |Michael Hoffmann |Benjamin Tapley |Samuel T. Turvey |Walter Jetz | +1 more

AbstractHuman-driven extinction threatens entire lineages across the Tree of Life. Here we assess the conservation status of jawed vertebrate evolutionary history, using three policy-relevant approaches. First, we calculate an index of threat to overall evolutionary history, showing that we expect to lose 86–150 billion years (11–19%) of jawed vertebrate evolutionary history over the next 50–500 years.

Feb 8, 2024 | biorxiv.org | Ryan Bates |Elizabeth Taylor |ElizaBeth Taylor |Yuheng Sun |Rikki Gumbs

AbstractThe IUCN Red List of Threatened Species assigns species to discrete categories based on a common set of criteria to capture relative extinction risk. Some quantitative analyses require a continuous probability of extinction not provided by discrete categories. Furthermore, the criteria may not translate to extinction risk in a universal way across species, because some species' attributes are not incorporated into the criteria.