Human Perceptions of Megafaunal Extinction Events Revealed by Linguistic Analysis of Indigenous Oral Traditions

Woven languages: understanding Indigenous socioecological systems

Language connects cultural and biological diversity and can contribute to both big data and localised approaches to improve conservation. Analysing Indigenous languages at regional level supports understanding of local ecologies and cultural revitalisation. Collated linguistic datasets can help to identify large-scale patterns, including extinctions, and forge robust multidisciplinary approaches to biocultural decision-making.

Postextinction Geographies: Audiovisual Afterlives of the Bucardo and the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

How do technologies animate more-than-human geographies after extinction? How can geographical scholarship evoke, or bring presence to, extinct biota? In an epoch simultaneously characterized by biotic loss at an unthinkable scale and the increased presence of representations depicting nonhuman life through mass media and digitization, we examine the epistemic, affective, and ethical possibilities of extinct animal traces to shape more-than-human geographies. We show how technological apparatuses inaugurate afterlives of extinction troubling binaries of extinct-extant and absence-presence. Specifically, we consider audio and visual remains of two taxa producing awkward and unsettling postextinction geographies: the ivory-billed woodpecker and the bucardo. Sound recordings and other historical traces continue to forge contemporary connections between human searchers and the ivory-billed woodpecker, although no sighting of the ghost bird has been universally accepted since 1944. The bucardo was declared extinct in 2000, but it was tentatively reanimated through a failed 2003 cloning project; in this milieu, visual technologies and representations conjure alternative presence and speculative futures beyond technoscientific spectacle. Through conversing our own situated, speculative, and technologically mediated relations with these taxa-and situating the technological assemblages themselves-we present some of the lively, contested, and dispersed ways technological apparatuses affect and inaugurate animated geographies after extinction.

The moa footprints from the Pliocene - early Pleistocene of Kyeburn, Otago, New Zealand

In March, 2019, a trackway of seven footprints was found at a riverbank outcrop of Maniototo Conglomerate Formation in the Kyeburn River, Central Otago, South Island, New Zealand. In this study, we describe this first known occurrence of moa (Dinornithiformes) footprints to be found and recovered in Te Waipounamu/South Island. Footprints of the trackway were ∼46 mm deep, 272-300 mm wide and 260-294 mm in length. An associated separate footprint was 448 mm wide and 285 mm long. Cosmogenic nuclide dating of adjacent overlying beds from the same formation establishes a mean minimum age of burial age for the tracks of 3.57 Ma (+1.62/-1.18 Ma) with a mode of 2.9 Ma, which we interpret to be Late Pliocene, with a conservative age range of Pliocene to Early Pleistocene. The trackway maker is identified as a moa from the Emeidae family, probably from the genus Pachyornis, with a mean mass of 84.61 kg that was travelling at a speed of 2.61 kmh-1. The single adjacent footprint was made by an individual from the family Dinornithidae, most likely from the genus Dinornis with an estimated mass of 158 kg. These moa footprints represent the second earliest fossil record of moa.

Local Awareness and Interpretations of Species Extinction in a Rural Chinese Biodiversity Hotspot

Incorporating local perspectives is fundamental to evidence-based conservation, for both understanding complex socio-ecological systems and implementing appropriate management interventions. How local communities understand extinction, and whether these views affect perceptions of biodiversity loss and the effect of anthropogenic activities, has rarely been evaluated explicitly in conservation projects. To target this data gap, we conducted 185 interviews to assess levels and patterns of understanding about wildlife decline and extinction in rural communities around Bawangling National Nature Reserve, Hainan, China, a priority conservation site that has experienced recent species losses. Interviewees showed varying awareness of declines and extirpation of local wildlife species. Two-thirds did not consider the permanent disappearance of wildlife to be possible; among those who did, only one-third could comprehend the scientific term “extinction.” Thinking extinction is possible was associated with identifying declined and extirpated species, but not with perceiving locally-driven human activities, such as hunting, as the reason for wildlife loss. The government was seen as the entity most responsible for conservation. Variation found around local perceptions of extinction, its drivers, and conservation responsibility demonstrates that comprehension of key conservation concepts should not be assumed to be homogenous, highlighting the challenge of transposing scientific concepts between different social and cultural settings. Proactively incorporating local perspectives and worldviews, especially by obtaining context-specific baseline understandings, has major implications for other contexts worldwide and should inform conservation planning and management.

Complementarity, completeness and quality of long-term faunal archives in an Asian biodiversity hotspot

Long-term baselines on biodiversity change through time are crucial to inform conservation decision-making in biodiversity hotspots, but environmental archives remain unavailable for many regions. Extensive palaeontological, zooarchaeological and historical records and indigenous knowledge about past environmental conditions exist for China, a megadiverse country experiencing large-scale biodiversity loss, but their potential to understand past human-caused faunal turnover is not fully assessed. We investigate a series of complementary environmental archives to evaluate the quality of the Holocene-historical faunal record of Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, for establishing new baselines on postglacial mammalian diversity and extinction dynamics. Synthesis of multiple archives provides an integrated model of long-term biodiversity change, revealing that Hainan has experienced protracted and ongoing human-caused depletion of its mammal fauna from prehistory to the present, and that past baselines can inform practical conservation management. However, China's Holocene-historical archives exhibit substantial incompleteness and bias at regional and country-wide scales, with limited taxonomic representation especially for small-bodied species, and poor sampling of high-elevation landscapes facing current-day climate change risks. Establishing a clearer understanding of the quality of environmental archives in threatened ecoregions, and their ability to provide a meaningful understanding of the past, is needed to identify future conservation-relevant historical research priorities. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The past is a foreign country: how much can the fossil record actually inform conservation?'