The counteracting effects of human-driven speciation and extinction on mammal species richness and phylogenetic diversity
Data files
May 23, 2024 version files 85.83 KB
Abstract
Human activities are causing massive increases in extinction rates, but may also lead to drastic increases in speciation rates – for example following the human-mediated spread of species to otherwise unreachable landmasses. The long-term net anthropogenic effects on biodiversity, therefore, remain uncertain. The aim of this paper is to assess the combined anthropogenic effects of extinctions and speciations on biodiversity over geological time scales. We estimate known anthropogenic and predicted future extinctions based on Red List categories from the International Union for Conservation of Nature. We infer potential anthropogenic speciations assuming that all introductions to isolated landmasses will over time evolve into distinct species. We then estimate changes in regional and global species richness and phylogenetic diversity due to these extinctions and speciations. We show that if all species introduced into new landmasses develop into new species, the number of anthropogenic speciation and extinctions eventually become similar. However, even after accounting for an anthropogenic increase in speciation, our estimates suggest recovery times for phylogenetic diversity of several million years. Our results highlight that while humans are causing drastic biodiversity losses, human-driven speciation could eventually counterbalance these losses in species numbers, while phylogenetic diversity at least within our simulation scenarios would remain permanently reduced. This conclusion, however, requires our pressures on biodiversity to cease soon and requires us to consider geological timescales rather than changes over this century.
README: The counteracting effects of human-driven speciation and extinction on mammal species richness and phylogenetic diversity
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.z08kprrfw
The main part of the dataset contains information on what mammals have established introduced populations across continents as well as any island of at least 100 km^2 which are surrounded by sufficiently deep water to not be connected to continents or larger islands during the lowest sea level in the Late Pleistocene.
Description of the data and file structure
Three separate files are uploaded.
- A zip file called codes.zip contains R codes for running all analyses from the underlying paper.
- A CSV file called Appendix_1.csv contains information on all introduced mammals in binary coding, i.e., columns have a value of 1 for species introduced to that island and 0 for all others.
- A pdf file called Introduced_species_info contains two tables. The first provides summary data of introductions across islands, the second contains the citations or potential notes behind each introduction noted in the CSV file.
Sharing/Access information
The dataset is published under the CC0 license waiver. The authors highly encourage users to provide adequate citations to the data used. We encourage users only interested in a single introduction to cite the sources we list in table S2 and any users of the entire dataset or large parts thereof to cite the underlying paper in addition to or instead of the DOI to this Dryad entry.
Code/Software
All R codes used in the analyses are also uploaded although we note that these are not optimized and could be better.