Biodiversity, a central component of Earth's life support systems, is directly relevant to
human societies. We examine the dimensions and nature of the Earth's terrestrial …

Most attempts to quantify the impact of humanity on nature and bring it to public attention
have centred around estimates of extinction rates. Suggestions that these figures have been …

The looming mass extinction of biodiversity in the humid tropics is a major concern for the
future, yet most reports of extinctions in these regions are anecdotal or conjectural, with a …

In the face of worldwide habitat fragmentation, managers need to devise a time frame for
action. We ask how fast do understory bird species disappear from experimentally isolated …

The Cape Floristic Region of South Africa is a global biodiversity hotspot. In 1998, a process
of conservation planning began in the region that required quantitative targets for …

Identification of the causes of productivity–species diversity relationships remains a central
topic of ecological research,. Different relations have been attributed to the influence of …

Rainforests in eastern Australia have been extensively cleared over the past two centuries.
In recent decades, there have been increasing efforts to reforest some of these cleared …

The maintenance of biodiversity rests on understanding and resolving conflict between
patterns of species occurrence and human activity. Recent debate has centered on the …

Nest predation has been established as a leading source of reproductive failure in
songbirds. Numerous studies, conducted primarily in the Northern Hemisphere, have linked …

A question rarely raised in discussions on biodiversity conservation, but surely the biggest
question of all, is “How much time do we have left before the mass extinction underway …