The problem "What kind of living things tends to be extinct during environmental change?" is controversial for a long time in ecological science and conservation biology. However, there are no studies quantifying characteristics of organisms which tend to be extinct in a real ecosystem according to changing factor which actually threaten living things, and no studies indicating general features of "extinction vulnerability". In order to reveal these features, a research group led by Associate Professor Satoshi Chiba at Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University has investigated the nature of terrestrial gastropods in Ogasawara archipelago which extinct or decreased drastically since the Meiji era, in each island and each period. As a result, the features common to extinctions have been found on some of the factors. However, on the other factors, nature of extinctions turned out to be different among periods and islands. It has been shown that resistance to a type of threat does not guarantee long-term survival of species, and patterns of extinctions in the future are likely to be different those in the past. This research results indicate that it is risky to overemphasize the rank of rare and endangered species in respect to protection measures of wildlife and ecosystem.

The research results have been published online in Proceeding of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on May 23, 2011. The paper's title is "Selectivity of terrestrial gastropod extinctions on an oceanic archipelago and insights into the anthropogenic extinction process".

More information (Japanese) 

[Contact]

Associate Professor Satoshi Chiba

Laboratory of Community and Ecosystem Ecology

Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University

TEL: +81-22-795-7813