There have been five Mass Extinction events in the history of Earth's biodiversity, all caused
by dramatic but natural phenomena. It has been claimed that the Sixth Mass Extinction may …

Human activities are changing our environment. Along with climate change and a
widespread loss of biodiversity, plastic pollution now plays a predominant role in altering …

Nature is under siege. In the last 10,000 y the human population has grown from 1 million to
7.8 billion. Much of Earth's arable lands are already in agriculture (1), millions of acres of …

Humanity has become a dominant force in shaping the face of Earth 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
An emerging question is how the overall material output of human activities compares to the …

Major declines in insect biomass and diversity, reviewed here, have become obvious and
well documented since the end of World War II. Here, we conclude that the spread and …

Knowledge on the distribution and abundance of organisms is fundamental to
understanding their roles within ecosystems and their ecological importance for other taxa …

The ongoing sixth mass species extinction is the result of the destruction of component
populations leading to eventual extirpation of entire species. Populations and species …

Recent case studies showing substantial declines of insect abundances have raised alarm,
but how widespread such patterns are remains unclear. We compiled data from 166 long …

Here we build on the manifesto 'World Scientists' Warning to Humanity, issued by the
Alliance of World Scientists. As a group of conservation biologists deeply concerned about …

Big, time-scaled phylogenies are fundamental to connecting evolutionary processes to
modern biodiversity patterns. Yet inferring reliable phylogenetic trees for thousands of …