Study of islands reveals surprising extincti...( (Santa Barbara Calif.) It's no secr...)

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) It's no secret that humans are having a huge impact on the life cycles of plants and animals. UC Santa Barbara's Steven D. Gaines and fellow researcher Dov Sax decided to test that theory by studying the world's far-flung islands.

Their research, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds surprising light on the subject of extinction rates of species on islands. The paper, "Species Invasions and Extinction: The Future of Native Biodiversity on Islands," is one in a series of reports by this team studying how humans have altered the ecosystems of the planet.

Gaines and Sax started the project with a question: What effect are humans really having on biological diversity? "The presumption at the time was that we are driving biodiversity to lower levels," said Gaines, who directs UCSB's Marine Science Institute. "Certainly, if you think about it at the global level, this is true because humans have done a lot of things that have driven species extinct."

However, when studied on the smaller scale of islands, the findings showed something completely different. Diversity is on the rise markedly so in some instances. Diversity has gone up so dramatically that it might cause some to wonder if the health of the ecosystems might not be better because the number of species is twice as high as it used to be. But it's not that simple, Gaines said.

"What Dov and I worked on a few years ago is the fact that the vast majority of introductions (of species) don't have large negative effects," Gaines said. "Indeed, most species that get introduced don't have much effect at all. It doesn't mean that they're not altering the ecosystem, but they're not driving things extinct like some of the big poster-child stories we've been hearing about."

Still, the study showed that human colonization has had a massive impact on ecosystems of islands, with the introduction o
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