Marine extinction risk shaped by trait–environment interactions over 500 million years |
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| Authors: | Emily A Orzechowski Rowan Lockwood Jarrett E K Byrnes Sean C Anderson Seth Finnegan Zoe V Finkel Paul G Harnik David R Lindberg Lee Hsiang Liow Heike K Lotze Craig R McClain Jenny L McGuire Aaron O'Dea John M Pandolfi Carl Simpson Derek P Tittensor |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA;2. Department of Geology, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA;3. Biology Department, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA;4. Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada;5. Environmental Science Program, Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB, Canada;6. Department of Earth and Environment, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, USA;7. Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway;8. Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada;9. National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Durham, NC, USA;10. School of Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;11. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Republic of Panamá;12. Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld, Australia;13. Department of Paleobiology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA;14. United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Cambridge, CB3 0DL, UK |
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| Abstract: | Perhaps the most pressing issue in predicting biotic responses to present and future global change is understanding how environmental factors shape the relationship between ecological traits and extinction risk. The fossil record provides millions of years of insight into how extinction selectivity (i.e., differential extinction risk) is shaped by interactions between ecological traits and environmental conditions. Numerous paleontological studies have examined trait‐based extinction selectivity; however, the extent to which these patterns are shaped by environmental conditions is poorly understood due to a lack of quantitative synthesis across studies. We conducted a meta‐analysis of published studies on fossil marine bivalves and gastropods that span 458 million years to uncover how global environmental and geochemical changes covary with trait‐based extinction selectivity. We focused on geographic range size and life habit (i.e., infaunal vs. epifaunal), two of the most important and commonly examined predictors of extinction selectivity. We used geochemical proxies related to global climate, as well as indicators of ocean acidification, to infer average global environmental conditions. Life‐habit selectivity is weakly dependent on environmental conditions, with infaunal species relatively buffered from extinction during warmer climate states. In contrast, the odds of taxa with broad geographic ranges surviving an extinction (>2500 km for genera, >500 km for species) are on average three times greater than narrow‐ranging taxa (estimate of odds ratio: 2.8, 95% confidence interval = 2.3–3.5), regardless of the prevailing global environmental conditions. The environmental independence of geographic range size extinction selectivity emphasizes the critical role of geographic range size in setting conservation priorities. |
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| Keywords: | differential extinction risk extinction selectivity geographic range life habit mass extinction mollusk survivorship |
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