Serena Turton-Hughes, George Holmes, Christopher Hassall
{"title":"The diversity of ignorance and the ignorance of diversity: origins and implications of \"shadow diversity\" for conservation biology and extinction.","authors":"Serena Turton-Hughes, George Holmes, Christopher Hassall","doi":"10.1017/ext.2024.21","DOIUrl":"10.1017/ext.2024.21","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Biodiversity shortfalls and taxonomic bias can lead to inaccurate assessment of conservation priorities. Previous literature has begun to explore practical reasons why some species are discovered sooner or are better researched than others. However, the deeper socio-cultural causes for undiscovered and neglected biodiversity, and the value of collectively analysing species at risk of unrecorded, or \"dark\", extinction, are yet to be fully examined. Here, we argue that a new label (we propose \"shadow diversity\") is needed to shift our perspective from biodiversity shortfalls to living, albeit unknown, species. We suggest this linguistic shift imparts intrinsic value to these species, beyond scientific gaze and cultural systems. We review research on undiscovered, undetected and hidden biodiversity in the fields of conservation biology, macroecology and genetics. Drawing on philosophy, geography, history and sociology, we demonstrate that a range of socio-cultural factors (funding, education and historical bias) combine with traditional, practical impediments to limit species discovery and detection. We propose using a spectrum of shadow diversity which enables a complex, non-binary and comprehensive approach to biodiversity unknowns. Shadow diversity holds exciting potential as a tool to increase awareness, appreciation and support for the conservation of traditionally less studied wildlife species and sites, from soil microbes to less charismatic habitat fragments. We advocate for a shift in how the conservation community and wider public see biodiversity and an increase in popular support for conserving a wider range of life forms. Most importantly, shadow diversity provides appropriate language and conceptual frameworks to discuss species absent from conservation assessment and at potential risk of dark extinction.</p>","PeriodicalId":520449,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge prisms. Extinction","volume":"2 ","pages":"e18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11895729/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143618145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lucas Rodriguez Forti, Ana Marta P R da Silva Passetti, Talita Oliveira, Juan Lima, Arthur Queiros, Maria Alice Dantas Ferreira Lopes, Judit K Szabo
{"title":"Global threat status, rarity, and species distribution affect prevalence of Atlantic Forest endemic birds in citizen-collected datasets.","authors":"Lucas Rodriguez Forti, Ana Marta P R da Silva Passetti, Talita Oliveira, Juan Lima, Arthur Queiros, Maria Alice Dantas Ferreira Lopes, Judit K Szabo","doi":"10.1017/ext.2024.22","DOIUrl":"10.1017/ext.2024.22","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Atlantic Forest is one of the most threatened biomes globally. Data from monitoring programs are necessary to evaluate the conservation status of species, prioritise conservation actions and to evaluate the effectiveness of these actions. Birds are particularly well represented in citizen-collected datasets that are used worldwide in ecological and conservation studies. Here, we analyse presence-only data from three online citizen science datasets of Atlantic Forest endemic bird species to evaluate whether the representation of these species was correlated with their global threat status, range and estimated abundance. We conclude that even though species are over- and under-represented with regard to their presumed abundance, data collected by citizen scientists can be used to infer species distribution and, to a lesser degree, species abundance. This pattern holds true for species across global threat status.</p>","PeriodicalId":520449,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge prisms. Extinction","volume":"2 ","pages":"e17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11895707/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143618074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Negotiating extirpation: On the political implications of declaring dugongs extinct in Okinawan waters.","authors":"Marius Palz","doi":"10.1017/ext.2024.17","DOIUrl":"10.1017/ext.2024.17","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In 2021, scientists published a preprint stating that the dugong population of Okinawa had declined below the minimum viable population and should be considered extinct. The publication led to an outcry amongst Japanese/Okinawan environmentalists and to criticism by international dugong specialists. Two issues were raised: 1) Declaring dugongs extinct, although feeding trails were found in several locations, misrepresented the reality in Okinawan waters, and could have negative impacts on conservation measures; 2) Three authors were sitting on the Environmental Monitoring Committee for a controversial military base construction project in an area where dugongs were frequently spotted before construction commenced. The presence/absence of dugongs at the site had become a political issue, as the animal's protected status and its depiction in folklore gave it symbolic meaning in the anti-base movement. The declaration of dugong extinction reminded protesters of a former Environmental Impact Assessment conducted by Japan's Ministry of Defence, declaring the site to be no relevant dugong habitat. The paper explores the implications of the preprint for the political situation in Okinawa and questions the certainty of dugong extirpation in the region. It argues that speculations about extinction cannot be divorced from the political contexts to which they are invariably tied.</p>","PeriodicalId":520449,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge prisms. Extinction","volume":"2 ","pages":"e16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11895706/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143618142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sicily Fiennes, Novi Hardianto, Silvi Dwi Ansari, Asri A Dwiyahreni, Tom Jackson, George Holmes, Christoper Birchall, Christopher Hassall
{"title":"Rethinking extinction \"crises\": The case of Asian songbird trade.","authors":"Sicily Fiennes, Novi Hardianto, Silvi Dwi Ansari, Asri A Dwiyahreni, Tom Jackson, George Holmes, Christoper Birchall, Christopher Hassall","doi":"10.1017/ext.2024.20","DOIUrl":"10.1017/ext.2024.20","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Different stakeholders and actors frequently describe environmental challenges as 'crises'. These crises are often wicked problems that are difficult to resolve due to the complex and contradictory nature of the evidence and knowledge systems surrounding them. Here, we examine a crisis narrative surrounding the IUCN-declared Asian Songbird Crisis (ASC), with its epicentre in Indonesia, where an extensive birdkeeping culture persists. We investigate how bird extinction is perceived by different actors, particularly conservation law enforcement and practitioners working in this space. We unravel local perspectives on the complex relationship between bird trade and extinction through one-to-one interviews and focus groups. Our examination reveals a diversity of attitudes to the ASC, with many law enforcement actors not recognising the crisis label. Market mechanisms result in complex shifts in harvesting pressure onto one or more closely related similar species. The findings challenge the prevailing notion that species extinction significantly affects wildlife trades, emphasising the plastic nature of trade and the coming and going of species fashions. By revealing the divergent views of actors on extinction and the ASC, we highlight the need for shared language, particularly the implications of the 'crisis' label, around species extinction.</p>","PeriodicalId":520449,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge prisms. Extinction","volume":"2 ","pages":"e15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11895710/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143618144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the edges of extinction: Indigenous whaling governance, the 1977 \"bowhead controversy\" and its legacy.","authors":"Sonja Åman","doi":"10.1017/ext.2024.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ext.2024.14","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In its nearly 80-year history, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has shifted from a \"whalers club\" to an international governance body chiefly focused on the protection and conservation of global cetacean populations. Drawing on recent scholarship on extinction and its entanglements, this article compares two addresses given by whalers at IWC meetings 40 years apart to problematise the way whaling and its relation to extinction is conceptualised in international environmental governance. Guided by practice-oriented document analysis and recent theorisation of extinction as an entangled process, this article analyses the personal stakeholder testimonies from two different representatives of the North Slope whalers of Northern Alaska to the IWC - one in relation to the 1977 Alaska bowhead whaling controversy and the other in the context of the 2018 negotiations over streamlining Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling management and supporting greater flexibility and Indigenous autonomy. By comparing these two statements from very different points of history for the IWC and the governance of Indigenous whaling, this article illustrates some of the ongoing struggles for environmental governance to recognise extinction as a complex, multifaceted process that reverberates throughout human and more-than-human communities.</p>","PeriodicalId":520449,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge prisms. Extinction","volume":"2 ","pages":"e10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11895709/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143618143","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"clocks replaced with : ; . [Deschooling Time in the Small Isles].","authors":"Kate Elspeth Simpson","doi":"10.1017/ext.2024.6","DOIUrl":"10.1017/ext.2024.6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Scottish Small Isles - comprising Muck, Rùm, Eigg, Canna, and by extension, Coll - are geologically complex, with intersecting rock samples from the Archean (Lewisian Gneiss basements formed approximately 3 billion years ago), Proterozoic (Torridonian sandstone formed approximately 1 billion years ago), Mesozoic (sedimentation deposited approximately 200 million years ago) and Palaeocene (basalt formed approximately 55.8 million years ago as part of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event). This practice research article - drawing on palaeontology, kinaesthetic learning and creative writing - takes the Small Isles as a case study for what geologist Marcia Bjornerud defines as a discernible \"time<i>ful</i>ness\" that humans should seek to attain: \"an acute consciousness of how the world is made by-indeed, made of-time\" (2020, <i>Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World</i>, 5). Through their lithic intrusions, and interruptive strata, the Small Isles offer an alternative form of pedagogy: where multiple epochs, tenses and tempos visibly converse with one another; where \"polytemporality\" can be witnessed and physically experienced; where the notion of linear time is destabilised.</p>","PeriodicalId":520449,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge prisms. Extinction","volume":"2 ","pages":"e11"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11895745/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143618071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jonathan D Roberts, Lorna L Waddington, Rupert J Quinnell, Graham Huggan, Alison M Dunn
{"title":"Parasites and plantations: Disease, environment and society in efforts to induce extinction of hookworm in Jamaica, 1919-1936.","authors":"Jonathan D Roberts, Lorna L Waddington, Rupert J Quinnell, Graham Huggan, Alison M Dunn","doi":"10.1017/ext.2024.15","DOIUrl":"10.1017/ext.2024.15","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Studies of extinction typically focus on unintended losses of biodiversity and culture. This study, however, examines an attempt to induce extinction of a parasite: human hookworm (<i>Necator americanus</i> and <i>Ancylostoma duodenale</i>). Our interdisciplinary approach integrates medical history and epidemiology using records created by the Jamaica Hookworm Commission of 1919-1936. We show that the attempt to induce the extinction of hookworms was driven by its perceived effects on labour productivity and consequent status as an ideological and economic threat. We use spatial epidemiology to describe the relationships between parasites, environments and the working conditions of plantation labourers. Using data from 330 locations across Jamaica in which 169,380 individuals were tested for hookworm infection we show that the prevalence of hookworm infection was higher in districts surrounding plantations. Prevalence decreased with the temperature of the coldest month, increased with the amount of rainfall in the driest month, and increased with vegetation quantity (normalised difference vegetation index). Worm burden (and thus pathology) varied greatly between individuals, even those living together; hookworm infection varied between environments, socioeconomic conditions and individuals. Nevertheless, the conditions of labour shaped the distribution of hookworms. Plantations both spread and problematised hookworms, driving efforts to bring it to extinction.</p>","PeriodicalId":520449,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge prisms. Extinction","volume":"3 ","pages":"e1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11895711/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143618148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Phylogenetic diversity in conservation: A brief history, critical overview, and challenges to progress - Authors response to reviewers.","authors":"Marcel Cardillo","doi":"10.1017/ext.2023.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ext.2023.17","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Cardillo M (2023). Phylogenetic diversity in conservation: A brief history, critical overview, and challenges to progress. <i>Cambridge Prisms: Extinction</i> <b>1</b>, e11.</p>","PeriodicalId":520449,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge prisms. Extinction","volume":"1 ","pages":"e19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11895708/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143618140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
David S L Ramsey, Dean P Anderson, Andrew M Gormley
{"title":"Invasive species eradication: How do we declare success?","authors":"David S L Ramsey, Dean P Anderson, Andrew M Gormley","doi":"10.1017/ext.2023.1","DOIUrl":"10.1017/ext.2023.1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Deciding whether or not eradication of an invasive species has been successful is one of the main dilemmas facing managers of eradication programmes. When the species is no longer being detected, a decision must be made about when to stop the eradication programme and declare success. In practice, this decision is usually based on ad hoc rules, which may be inefficient. Since surveillance undertaken to confirm species absence is imperfect, any declaration of eradication success must consider the risk and the consequences of being wrong. If surveillance is insufficient, then eradication may be falsely declared (a Type I error), whereas continuation of surveillance when eradication has already occurred wastes resources (a Type II error). We review the various methods that have been developed for quantifying these errors and incorporating them into the decision-making process. We conclude with an overview of future developments likely to improve the practice of determining invasive species eradication success.</p>","PeriodicalId":520449,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge prisms. Extinction","volume":"1 ","pages":"e4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11895739/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143618139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}