Institute for Applied Ecology, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Apr 16;110(16):6436-41. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1216511110. Epub 2013 Mar 25.
The largest extinction event in the Holocene occurred on Pacific islands, where Late Quaternary fossils reveal the loss of thousands of bird populations following human colonization of the region. However, gaps in the fossil record mean that considerable uncertainty surrounds the magnitude and pattern of these extinctions. We use a Bayesian mark-recapture approach to model gaps in the fossil record and to quantify losses of nonpasserine landbirds on 41 Pacific islands. Two-thirds of the populations on these islands went extinct in the period between first human arrival and European contact, with extinction rates linked to island and species characteristics that increased susceptibility to hunting and habitat destruction. We calculate that human colonization of remote Pacific islands caused the global extinction of close to 1,000 species of nonpasserine landbird alone; nonpasserine seabird and passerine extinctions will add to this total.
全新世最大的灭绝事件发生在太平洋岛屿上，晚第四纪的化石揭示了在人类殖民该地区后，数千种鸟类种群的消失。然而，化石记录的空白意味着这些灭绝的规模和模式存在相当大的不确定性。我们使用贝叶斯标记-重捕方法来模拟化石记录中的空白，并量化 41 个太平洋岛屿上非雀形目陆地鸟类的损失。这些岛屿上的三分之二的种群在人类首次到达和与欧洲接触之间的时期灭绝，灭绝率与增加了对狩猎和栖息地破坏的易感性的岛屿和物种特征有关。我们计算得出，人类对偏远太平洋岛屿的殖民化导致了全球近 1000 种非雀形目陆地鸟类的灭绝；非雀形目海鸟和雀形目鸟类的灭绝将使这一总数增加。
