Assessing the wider implications of species extinctions: island birds and beyond School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham

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Humans, through a range of drivers, are known to have increased species extinction rates by orders of magnitude compared to the background extinction rate. Island birds have been particularly impacted, with hundreds of known extinctions.

Given the increasing availability of data relating to extinct species and their functional traits, including a novel database on extinct birds that I present here, it is now possible to evaluate many of the wider impacts of anthropogenic extinctions.

Focusing primarily on island birds as a case study, I review three such impacts, namely the effect of species loss on: (i) functional and phylogenetic diversity, (ii) island ecosystem functioning, and (iii) our understanding of biogeographic patterns, and the natural world more broadly.