Amphibians over the edge: silent extinction risk of Data Deficient species

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Effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on amphibians: A review and prospectus

Samuel Cushman (2006)

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Random forests for classification in ecology.

D Cutler, Thomas C. Edwards, Karen Beard … (2007)

Classification procedures are some of the most widely used statistical methods in ecology. Random forests (RF) is a new and powerful statistical classifier that is well established in other disciplines but is relatively unknown in ecology. Advantages of RF compared to other statistical classifiers include (1) very high classification accuracy; (2) a novel method of determining variable importance; (3) ability to model complex interactions among predictor variables; (4) flexibility to perform several types of statistical data analysis, including regression, classification, survival analysis, and unsupervised learning; and (5) an algorithm for imputing missing values. We compared the accuracies of RF and four other commonly used statistical classifiers using data on invasive plant species presence in Lava Beds National Monument, California, USA, rare lichen species presence in the Pacific Northwest, USA, and nest sites for cavity nesting birds in the Uinta Mountains, Utah, USA. We observed high classification accuracy in all applications as measured by cross-validation and, in the case of the lichen data, by independent test data, when comparing RF to other common classification methods. We also observed that the variables that RF identified as most important for classifying invasive plant species coincided with expectations based on the literature.

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Ecological basis of extinction risk in birds: habitat loss versus human persecution and introduced predators.

I. P. F. Owens, P. M. Bennett (2000)

Understanding the ecological mechanisms that underlie extinction is fundamental to conservation. It is well established that not all taxa are equally vulnerable to extinction, but the reasons for these differences are poorly understood. This may be, in part, because different taxa are threatened by different mechanisms. Theoretically, sources of extinction risk that perturb the balance between fecundity and longevity, such as human persecution and introduced predators, should be particularly hazardous for taxa that have slow rates of population growth. In contrast, sources of extinction risk that reduce niche availability, such as habitat loss, should represent a particular threat to taxa that are ecologically specialized. Here we test these predictions by using a phylogenetic comparative method and a database on 95 families of birds. As theory predicts, extinction risk incurred through persecution and introduced predators is associated with large body size and long generation time but is not associated with degree of specialization, whereas extinction risk incurred through habitat loss is associated with habitat specialization and small body size but not with generation time. These results demonstrate the importance of considering separately the multiple mechanisms that underlie contemporary patterns of extinction. They also reveal why it has previously proven so difficult to identify simple ecological correlates of overall extinction risk.