Data from: Unpacking the extinction crisis: rates, patterns, and causes of recent extinctions in plants and animals

Biodiversity loss is considered one of the greatest challenges facing Earth today. The most direct information on species loss comes from the hundreds of human-related extinctions in the recent past. However, our understanding of these recent extinctions is incomplete, especially in terms of their causes and their rates and patterns among clades, across habitats, and over time. Furthermore, prominent studies have extrapolated these extinctions to suggest that Earth is experiencing a mass extinction event. Such extrapolations assume that recent extinctions predict current extinction risk and are homogeneous among groups, over time, and among environments. Here, we analyze rates and patterns of recent extinctions (last ~500 years). Surprisingly, we find that past extinctions did not strongly predict current risk among groups. Extinctions varied strongly among groups, and were most frequent among mollusks, turtles, birds, and mammals, and relatively rare in plants and the largest group of animals (arthropods). Extinction rates varied over time, increasing over the last five centuries, but (surprisingly) often declining in the last ~100 years. Recent extinctions were biased ecologically, with high frequencies in freshwater and on islands (and with most non-island extinctions in freshwater). Island extinctions were caused most frequently by invasive species, but habitat loss was the most important cause and current threat in continental regions. Overall, we identify the major patterns in recent extinctions. We also suggest that past extinctions should not be extrapolated without accounting for how they vary among groups, among habitats, and over time.