Extinction is a natural part of evolution, but as civilisation and industrialisation has gathered pace, so has the extinction rate.
In the past, the extinction rate has been balanced by the evolution of new species, but the current, human-caused extinction is happening so fast that evolution cannot keep pace.
Although 2007 was a far more difficult year, the pace of extinction slowed; in the first nine months just 409 funds gave up the ghost.
Dr. Pimm and Dr. Gibson agreed that the fast pace of extinction in forest fragments gives an urgency to conserving the large swaths of tropical forest that still remain.
Section 4 compares linguistic diversity with biodiversity, while Section 5 compares the pace of extinction between language and living organism.
While the rate of species extinction has greatly increased, the pace at which we are exploring species has not.
Certainly it does not capture the endless inflections of "cool", possibly imported into America by African slaves using the West African word kul to mean "excellent" and now, says Mr Fischer, the most widely borrowed adjective on earth.Looking to the future, Mr Fischer assumes that the pace of language extinction will accelerate, driven by electronic technology.
Many orchid species in Madagascar and elsewhere are in dire need of study to keep pace with projected extinction rates this century.
The increasing pace of species extinction, coupled with the decreasing pool of taxonomic expertise, means that there is an urgent need to speed up the process of investigating biodiversity.
Further, because ecosystems are incredibly complex and only a fraction of the world's species has been described, the lack of information regarding species interactions, their contributions to ecosystem processes, and the pace of their extinctions is immense.
