Prof. Andrew Gonzalez,
Department of Biology
April 30, 2008
Rates of biodiversity loss are greater than at any other time in human history. Current rates of species extinction are estimated to be a hundred to a thousand times the background rate and population extinction ten to a hundred times more. The chief causes of this loss are habitat destruction and fragmentation acting in concert with climate change, pollution, invasive species, and harvesting.
In this lecture I will describe how extinction is caused. I will go on to show how our understanding of extinction can be used to make estimates of future rates of extinction under various scenarios of environmental change. I will close on a positive note and provide some prescriptions for how society might mitigate biodiversity loss.