By Virginia Gewin of Nature magazine
A massive extinction resulting from habitat loss is under way--but perhaps not as rapidly as is often predicted.
A paper published today in Nature explains why past predictions of extinction rates--for example, a 1980 US National Research Council report predicting losses of millions of species by the year 2000--have not been realized.
"We have mathematically proven why these 'guesstimates' are flawed," says Fangliang He, an ecologist currently at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and a co-author of the latest study.
In essence, says He, faulty assumptions are to blame. [More]
Source: Hidden Assumption Inflates Species-Loss Predictions
