BACKGROUND: Comparing patterns of terrestrial and marine defaunation helps to place human impacts on marine fauna in context and to navigate toward recovery. Defaunation began in earnest tens of thousands of years later in the oceans than it did on land. Although defaunation has been less severe in the oceans than on land, our effects on marine animals are increasing in pace and impact. Humans have caused few complete extinctions in the sea, but we are responsible for many ecological, commercial, and local extinctions. Despite our late start, humans have already powerfully changed virtually all major marine ecosystems.

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Strong decreases in greenhouse gas emissions are required to meet the reduction trajectory resolved within the 2015 Paris Agreement. However, even these decreases will not avert serious stress and damage to life on Earth, and additional steps are needed to boost the resilience of ecosystems, safeguard their wildlife, and protect their capacity to supply vital goods and services. We discuss how well-managed marine reserves may help marine ecosystems and people adapt to five prominent impacts of climate change: acidification, sea-level rise, intensification of storms, shifts in species distribution, and decreased productivity and oxygen availability, as well as their cumulative effects. We explore the role of managed ecosystems in mitigating climate change by promoting carbon sequestration and storage and by buffering against uncertainty in management, environmental fluctuations, directional change, and extreme events. We highlight both strengths and limitations and conclude that marine reserves are a viable low-tech, cost-effective adaptation strategy that would yield multiple cobenefits from local to global scales, improving the outlook for the environment and people into the future.

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The modern process of defaunation can be alarmingly obvious or surprisingly cryptic, depending on the scale examined. It is thus important to distinguish three interrelated spatial scales of defaunation. 3.1.1. Global extinction. At a global scale, human-associated extinction of animal life on the planet is profound. Modern rates of vertebrate extinctions have been estimated to be up to 100 times greater than the most conservative background rates of ∼2 vertebrate extinctions per million species per year (Ceballos et al. 2015). Although most of the extinctions to date have been documented in terrestrial ecosystems (e.g., 338 vertebrates since the year 1500) (IUCN 2015), the highest proportion of extinctions has been recorded in freshwater ecosystems (Collen et al. 2014). Marine ecosystems, by comparison, lag much further behind, with only ∼15 marine animal extinctions recorded during this same time period (McCauley et al. 2015b). Regarding invertebrates, information on global extinctions (or defaunation in general) is very limited (Supplemental Figure 1; follow the Supplemental Material link from the Annual Reviews home page at http://www.annualreviews.org), but recent efforts on the levels of threat to species in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List (Collen et al. 2012) provide some insights. Of the 3,623 terrestrial invertebrate species assessed on the Red List, 42% are classified as threatened with extinction. Of the 1,306 species of marine invertebrates on the Red List, close to 25% are threatened with extinction. Finally, of the 7,784 species of freshwater invertebrates on the Red List, 34% are listed as threatened, but the Red List includes 131 species classified as extinct. Invertebrates, however, are the least well evaluated faunal groups within the IUCN database, making it challenging to determine precisely the risks faced by data-deficient and unreviewed species (Dirzo et al. 2014, McCauley et al. 2015b).

Extinction risk in vertebrates has been linked to large body size, but this putative relationship has only been explored for select taxa, with variable results. Using a newly assembled and taxonomically expansive database, we analyzed the relationships between extinction risk and body mass (27,647 species) and between extinction risk and range size (21,294 species) for vertebrates across six main classes. We found that the probability of being threatened was positively and significantly related to body mass for birds, cartilaginous fishes, and mammals. Bimodal relationships were evident for amphibians, reptiles, and bony fishes. Most importantly, a bimodal relationship was found across all vertebrates such that extinction risk changes around a body mass breakpoint of 0.035 kg, indicating that the lightest and heaviest vertebrates have elevated extinction risk. We also found range size to be an important predictor of the probability of being threatened, with strong negative relationships across nearly all taxa. A review of the drivers of extinction risk revealed that the heaviest vertebrates are most threatened by direct killing by humans. By contrast, the lightest vertebrates are most threatened by habitat loss and modification stemming especially from pollution, agricultural cropping, and logging. Our results offer insight into halting the ongoing wave of vertebrate extinctions by revealing the vulnerability of large and small taxa, and identifying size-specific threats. Moreover, they indicate that, without intervention, anthropogenic activities will soon precipitate a double truncation of the size distribution of the world's vertebrates, fundamentally reordering the structure of life on our planet.

Despite conceptual recognition that indirect effects initiated by large herbivores are likely to have profound impacts on ecological community structure and function, the existing literature on indirect effects focuses largely on the role of predators. As a result, we know neither the frequency and extent of herbivore-initiated indirect effects nor the mechanisms that regulate their strength. We examined the effects of ungulates on taxa (plants, arthropods, and an insectivorous lizard) representing several trophic levels, using a series of large, long-term, ungulate-exclusion plots that span a landscape-scale productivity gradient in an African savanna. At each of six sites, lizards, trees, and the numerically dominant order of arthropods (Coleoptera) were more abundant in the absence of ungulates. The effect of ungulates on arthropods was mediated by herbaceous vegetation cover. The effect on lizards was simultaneously mediated by both tree density (lizard microhabitat) and arthropod abundance (lizard food). The magnitudes of the experimental effects on all response variables (trees, arthropods, and lizards) were negatively correlated with two distinct measures of primary productivity. These results demonstrate strong cascading effects of ungulates, both trophic and nontrophic, and support the hypothesis that productivity regulates the strength of these effects. Hence, the strongest indirect effects (and thus, the greatest risks to ecosystem integrity after large mammals are extirpated) are likely to occur in low-productivity habitats.bottom-up ͉ top-down ͉ ecosystem engineers ͉ food webs ͉ trophic cascades