Have you ever wondered how many species were lost before we had the chance to discover them? In a paper now out in Conservation Biology, we estimated just that, for plant species in Singapore. This paper follows from the Chisholm Lab’s related work on Singapore birds and butterflies. All over the world, many species remain undiscovered while both known and unknown species continue to go … Continue reading Estimating undiscovered extinctions
Meryl Theng just had a new paper published in Biological Conservation, where she estimated that 46% of Singapore’s butterfly species have been extirpated since 1854. The special thing about this estimate is that it includes all species that existed, including species that went extinct before we had a chance to discover them. The trick to estimating undiscovered extinctions is the SEUX model. There is a … Continue reading Extinction of undiscovered butterflies + tutorial
What is the relationship between a plant’s historical probability of having being discovered and its probability that it went extinct? All else being equal, species with low abundance are less likely to be collected, and low abundance is both theoretically (e.g. McCarthy et al., 2014) and empirically cited as a good predictor of extinction probability. The empirical relationship has been observed both in general (McKinney, … Continue reading Relationship between species discovery and extinction probability
A common choice for a probability distribution of a probability is the beta distribution. It has the required support between 0 and 1, and with its two parameters we can obtain a pretty wide qualitative range for the probability density function. What should we do if we want to create correlated probabilities? We might look for some kind of multivariate generalisation of the beta distribution, … Continue reading Moments for a bivariate beta distribution
Historical data (e.g. sighting records) can be used to estimate historical extinction rates in a variety of ways. The Chisholm et al. (2016) method (earlier post) uses the data to estimate yearly extinction probabilities. The extinctions per million species-years (E/MSY) approach (Pimm et al., 2014) estimates they extinction probability averaged over species-years. Below, I use two small examples to illustrate the similarities and differences between … Continue reading Comparing E/MSY and Chisholm method
What is a confidence interval, really? We all learnt in undergrad how to find CIs for a standard distribution, but plugging numbers into equations never gave me a deep intuition for what was really going on. A worded definition is probably more helpful. Paraphrasing a bit from Wikipedia, we can think of the meaning of the confidence interval in terms of the procedure that we … Continue reading The method of confidence belts illustrated
The purpose of this blog post is to give a simplified account of how the Chisholm et al. (2016) method works for estimating undetected extinctions. To estimate the historical extinction rate within a taxonomic group, a naive approach would be to divide the number of species known to be extinct by the total number of species. However, this does not account for the historical process … Continue reading Estimating undetected extinctions
