Brook Barry W, Alroy John
School of Biological Sciences, University of Tasmania, Private Bag 55, Hobart 7001, Australia
Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, New South Wales 2109, Australia.
Biol Lett. 2017 Jan;13(1). doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2016.0828.
Extinction is a key feature of the evolutionary history of life, and assessments of extinction risk are essential for the effective protection of biodiversity. The goal in assembling this special issue of Biology Letters was to highlight problems and questions at the research frontier of extinction biology, with an emphasis on recent developments in the methodology of inferring the patterns and processes of extinction from a background of often noisy and sparse data. In selecting topics, we sought to illustrate how extinction is not simply a self-evident phenomenon, but the subject of a dynamic and quantitatively rigorous field of natural science, with practical applications to conservation.
灭绝是生命进化史的一个关键特征，而评估灭绝风险对于有效保护生物多样性至关重要。汇编本期《生物学快报》特刊的目的是突出灭绝生物学研究前沿的问题，重点关注从通常嘈杂且稀少的数据背景中推断灭绝模式和过程的方法学的最新进展。在选题时，我们试图说明灭绝并非仅仅是一个不言而喻的现象，而是自然科学中一个动态且定量严谨的领域的研究对象，对保护工作具有实际应用价值。
