Newswise — A new National Science Foundation grant awarded to Professor of Statistics Steve Wang will help him, his students, and a recent alumna decode why the Earth may be entering a modern extinction.
Scientists have generally agreed that during the past 550 million years, five mass extinctions already have occurred on Earth. Many long-lived groups are becoming threatened, says Wang, even ones that have survived for millions of years. That’s the kicker; previous studies of the fossil record—known from Earth’s sequence of rock layers—have shown that older groups were generally less likely to go extinct.
Wang and his students, including Zoey Werbin ’17, who came up with the idea of investigating age selectivity and seeing how that has changed over time, will use statistical methods to compare modern and ancient extinctions to gain clarity on extinction risk and to identify threats to biodiversity.
“Many plant and animal groups are being threatened as a result of human activity and its consequences, such as climate change, habitat loss, and over-hunting and over-fishing,” says Wang. “For example, shark populations have declined dramatically because they are caught as by-catch in commercial fishing, and because of over-exploitation for shark fin soup. Other groups such as tigers have had their habitat reduced and fragmented due to urbanization and agriculture.”
As a biology major, Werbin was a student in Wang's Stat 11 course. Wang had talked about the Paleobiology Database when discussing his past research and Werbin was introduced to the IUCN Red List through a Conservation Biology class.
Later, as part of an independent study, Werbin explored the relationship between the age of the taxon (a biological group) and its extinction risk collaborating with Wang and scientists from Stanford and the Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley.
Scientists have generally agreed that during the past 550 million years, five mass extinctions already have occurred on Earth. Many long-lived groups are becoming threatened, says Wang, even ones that have survived for millions of years. That’s the kicker; previous studies of the fossil record—known from Earth’s sequence of rock layers—have shown that older groups were generally less likely to go extinct.
Wang and his students, including Zoey Werbin ’17, who came up with the idea of investigating age selectivity and seeing how that has changed over time, will use statistical methods to compare modern and ancient extinctions to gain clarity on extinction risk and to identify threats to biodiversity.
“Many plant and animal groups are being threatened as a result of human activity and its consequences, such as climate change, habitat loss, and over-hunting and over-fishing,” says Wang. “For example, shark populations have declined dramatically because they are caught as by-catch in commercial fishing, and because of over-exploitation for shark fin soup. Other groups such as tigers have had their habitat reduced and fragmented due to urbanization and agriculture.”
As a biology major, Werbin was a student in Wang's Stat 11 course. Wang had talked about the Paleobiology Database when discussing his past research and Werbin was introduced to the IUCN Red List through a Conservation Biology class.
Later, as part of an independent study, Werbin explored the relationship between the age of the taxon (a biological group) and its extinction risk collaborating with Wang and scientists from Stanford and the Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley.
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