Credit: Joshua Brown, University of Vermont
Where will we find the causes of declining ecosystems? University of Vermont ecologist Nick Gotelli and his colleagues examined 6.1 million records covering 35,613 species — from Arctic tundra to the South Seas, including mammals, birds, fish, invertebrates and plants — expecting to find many places with species counts in freefall. Instead, they discovered something unexpected: a kind of rapid global species mash-up, as they report in the journal Science.