Humans and climate change drove the Holocene decline of the brown bear
The current debate about megafaunal extinctions during the Quaternary focuses on the extent to which they were driven by humans, climate change, or both. These two factors may have interacted in a complex and unexpected manner, leaving the exact pathways to prehistoric extinctions unresolved. Here w...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:5583342 2023-05-15T18:42:05+02:00 Humans and climate change drove the Holocene decline of the brown bear Albrecht, Jörg Bartoń, Kamil A. Selva, Nuria Sommer, Robert S. Swenson, Jon E. Bischof, Richard 2017-09-04 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5583342/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28871202 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10772-6 en eng Nature Publishing Group UK http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5583342/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28871202 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10772-6 © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. CC-BY Article Text 2017 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10772-6 2017-09-10T00:15:09Z The current debate about megafaunal extinctions during the Quaternary focuses on the extent to which they were driven by humans, climate change, or both. These two factors may have interacted in a complex and unexpected manner, leaving the exact pathways to prehistoric extinctions unresolved. Here we quantify, with unprecedented detail, the contribution of humans and climate change to the Holocene decline of the largest living terrestrial carnivore, the brown bear (Ursus arctos), on a continental scale. We inform a spatially explicit metapopulation model for the species by combining life-history data and an extensive archaeofaunal record from excavations across Europe with reconstructed climate and land-use data reaching back 12,000 years. The model reveals that, despite the broad climatic niche of the brown bear, increasing winter temperatures contributed substantially to its Holocene decline — both directly by reducing the species’ reproductive rate and indirectly by facilitating human land use. The first local extinctions occurred during the Mid-Holocene warming period, but the rise of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago marked the onset of large-scale extinctions, followed by increasingly rapid range loss and fragmentation. These findings strongly support the hypothesis that complex interactions between climate and humans may have accelerated megafaunal extinctions. Text Ursus arctos PubMed Central (PMC) Scientific Reports 7 1 |
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Article Albrecht, Jörg Bartoń, Kamil A. Selva, Nuria Sommer, Robert S. Swenson, Jon E. Bischof, Richard Humans and climate change drove the Holocene decline of the brown bear |
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The current debate about megafaunal extinctions during the Quaternary focuses on the extent to which they were driven by humans, climate change, or both. These two factors may have interacted in a complex and unexpected manner, leaving the exact pathways to prehistoric extinctions unresolved. Here we quantify, with unprecedented detail, the contribution of humans and climate change to the Holocene decline of the largest living terrestrial carnivore, the brown bear (Ursus arctos), on a continental scale. We inform a spatially explicit metapopulation model for the species by combining life-history data and an extensive archaeofaunal record from excavations across Europe with reconstructed climate and land-use data reaching back 12,000 years. The model reveals that, despite the broad climatic niche of the brown bear, increasing winter temperatures contributed substantially to its Holocene decline — both directly by reducing the species’ reproductive rate and indirectly by facilitating human land use. The first local extinctions occurred during the Mid-Holocene warming period, but the rise of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago marked the onset of large-scale extinctions, followed by increasingly rapid range loss and fragmentation. These findings strongly support the hypothesis that complex interactions between climate and humans may have accelerated megafaunal extinctions. |
format |
Text |
author |
Albrecht, Jörg Bartoń, Kamil A. Selva, Nuria Sommer, Robert S. Swenson, Jon E. Bischof, Richard |
author_facet |
Albrecht, Jörg Bartoń, Kamil A. Selva, Nuria Sommer, Robert S. Swenson, Jon E. Bischof, Richard |
author_sort |
Albrecht, Jörg |
title |
Humans and climate change drove the Holocene decline of the brown bear |
title_short |
Humans and climate change drove the Holocene decline of the brown bear |
title_full |
Humans and climate change drove the Holocene decline of the brown bear |
title_fullStr |
Humans and climate change drove the Holocene decline of the brown bear |
title_full_unstemmed |
Humans and climate change drove the Holocene decline of the brown bear |
title_sort |
humans and climate change drove the holocene decline of the brown bear |
publisher |
Nature Publishing Group UK |
publishDate |
2017 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5583342/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28871202 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10772-6 |
genre |
Ursus arctos |
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Ursus arctos |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5583342/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28871202 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10772-6 |
op_rights |
© The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
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CC-BY |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-10772-6 |
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Scientific Reports |
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