Strategies for 21st-century environmental management and conservation under global change require a strong understanding of the biological mechanisms that mediate responses to climate- and human-driven change to successfully mitigate range contractions, extinctions, and the degradation of ecosystem services. Biodiversity responses to past rapid warming events can be followed in situ and over extended periods, using cross-disciplinary approaches that provide cost-effective and scalable information for species’ conservation and the maintenance of resilient ecosystems in many bioregions. Beyond the intrinsic knowledge gain such integrative research will increasingly provide the context, tools, and relevant case studies to assist in mitigating climate-driven biodiversity losses in the 21st century and beyond.
Pathways to extinction start long before the death of the last individual. However, causes of early stage population declines and the susceptibility of small residual populations to extirpation are typically studied in isolation. Using validated process‐explicit models, we disentangle the ecological mechanisms and threats that were integral in the initial decline and later extinction of the woolly mammoth. We show that reconciling ancient DNA data on woolly mammoth population decline with fossil evidence of location and timing of extinction requires process‐explicit models with specific demographic and niche constraints, and a constrained synergy of climatic change and human impacts. Validated models needed humans to hasten climate‐driven population declines by many millennia, and to allow woolly mammoths to persist in mainland Arctic refugia until the mid‐Holocene. Our results show that the role of humans in the extinction dynamics of woolly mammoth began well before the Holocene, exerting lasting effects on the spatial pattern and timing of its range‐wide extinction.
Processes leading to the megafauna extinctions of the late Pleistocene and early-Holocene are uncertain, with intense debate on the roles of human hunting and climatic change. Using process-explicit simulations of climate-human-woolly mammoth interactions, which integrate spatiotemporal evidence from fossils and ancient DNA, we show that humans accelerated the timing of range collapse, extirpation and eventual extinction of woolly mammoth in Eurasia. Population growth and northward migrations of people during the late Pleistocene led to the premature extirpation of populations of woolly mammoth in areas of Eurasia that were climatically suitable into the Holocene, hastening climate-driven declines by up to 4,000 years in some regions. Our simulations also pinpoint mainland Arctic refugia where mammoths likely persisted until the mid-Holocene, some 5,000 years longer than previously thought. Our results reveal that the role of humans in the extinction dynamics of woolly mammoth was long and chronic, and not limited to a Holocene over-kill.
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