By ANDREW C. REVKIN – New York Times Opinion Pages
Fairly far along in my career as an environmental journalist, I had to start writing pieces that amounted to obituaries for species. First came Miss Waldron’s red colobus (which popped back on the radar, at least for now). Then the Yangtze River dolphin, or baiji (pictured below), then the Chinese paddlefish.
But most of the time, extinction is happening invisibly, a presumptive consequence of habitat loss and other factors. Now a statistical fight is brewing over the quality of calculations long made to estimate the rate at which species are departing.
The authors of a new paper in Nature, “Species–area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss,” claim to have mathematical proof showing results of such calculations, using the “species to area curve,” are uniformly too high.
They stress that this does not negate the reality of the wave of species loss under way in an increasingly human-dominated planet:
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