Holocene Extinctions

Samuel Turvey is Research Fellow at the Institute of Zoology, a department of the Zoological Society of London. He is a conservation biologist with a principal interest in the history and prehistory of human-caused extinctions and in developing conservation strategies for today's threatened species. He was deeply involved with the conservation efforts surrounding the Yangtze River dolphin, and was the lead author of the 2007 paper in Biology Letters which declared that it was probably extinct, generating tremendous international media attention. He has published numerous other academic papers in a range of scientific journals, including Nature.

Introduction ; 1. An Introduction to Late Glacial - Holocene Environments ; 2. In the Shadow of the Megafauna: Prehistoric Mammal and Bird Extinctions across the Holocene ; 3. Holocene Mammal Extinctions ; 4. Holocene Avian Extinctions ; 5. Past and Future Patterns of Freshwater Mussel Extinctions in North America during the Holocene ; 6. Holocene Extinctions in the Sea ; 7. Procellariform Extinctions in the Holocene: Threat Processes and Wider Ecosystem-Scale Implications ; 8. Coextinction: Anecdotes, Models and Speculation ; 9. Probabilistic Methods for Determining Extinction Chronologies ; 10. The Past is Another Country: Is Evidence for Prehistoric, Historical and Present-Day Extinction Really Comparable? ; 11. Holocene Deforestation: A History of Human-Environmental Interactions, Climate Change and Extinction ; 12. The Shape of Things to Come: Non-Native Mammalian Predators and the Fate of Island Bird Diversity ; 13. The Quaternary Fossil Record as a Source of Data for Evidence-Based Conservation: Is the Past the Key to the Future? ; 14. Holocene Extinctions and the Loss of Feature Diversity ; References