Global change is eroding life on earth at an unprecedented rate and scale. Species extinctions have accelerated over the last decades, with the concomitant loss of the functions and services they provide to human societies.
A general assumption is that this current loss of global biodiversity is paralleled by a decrease in the resilience of ecological systems. As such, preserving resilience of ecosystems has become a major conservation objective.
Now researchers at the University of Bristol have examined how species are responding to the rising environmental pressures, demonstrating in findings published today in Ecology Letters, that the planetary scale of human impacts to wildlife is also accelerating resilience loss of vertebrates worldwide.
Dr Pol Capdevila of the School of Biological Science said: “Global assessments of how the resilience of vertebrate species has changed over the last decades were absent before our study, rendering the assumption of global resilience loss untested.
Read more at University of Bristol
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