Publications by authors named "Jonathan D Gordon"
The Greatest Extinction Event in 66 Million Years? Contextualising Anthropogenic Extinctions.
Jack H Hatfield
,
Bethany J Allen
,
Tadhg Carroll
,
Christopher D Dean
,
Shuyu Deng
,
Jonathan D Gordon
Glob Chang Biol
September 2025
Biological communities are changing rapidly in response to human activities, with the high rate of vertebrate species extinction leading many to propose that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event. Five past mass extinction events have commonly been identified across the Phanerozoic, with the last occurring at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago (Ma). However, life on Earth has always changed and evolved, with most species ever to have existed now extinct.
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- Humans have changed ecosystems and biodiversity around the world for a long time, but we don’t fully understand how these changes have happened over time.
- Researchers studied a lot of pollen samples to see how plant communities have changed for thousands of years, finding that differences in plant types and numbers have varied across the globe.
- In some areas, as humans impacted the land, biodiversity increased, while in other places, it decreased, showing that humans have both helped and harmed plant diversity over the last 8,000 years.