Reacción a "More than 1,300 bird species will become extinct in the next 200 years"

This is a very good article that finally highlights the intrinsic value of the ecosystem services provided by birds. But this time, most interestingly, in the context of conservation biology. Species extinction is in itself a natural phenomenon, but it is also a consequence of human activities and, in the latter case, when birds disappear as elements of the ecosystems they inhabit, some of the functions of these ecosystems may disappear or suffer, giving rise to a dysfunction or alteration in the ecosystem, or to the substitution of the species that have disappeared by other more generalist species that can fulfil their role.

Unfortunately, and as shown in the scientific study, in the case of islands the degree of specialisation of many species is so high and the interdependence of some of them with others is such that evolution has made them companions along the way. In the island environment, this pathway is so narrow that this functional role is less likely to lead to short-term substitution of generalist species by those that have recently disappeared, so that the phenomenon of the extinction of island birds causes the ecosystems they inhabit or elements of them to suffer much more, as the researchers report.

This type of publications and the data they provide should be taken into account when drawing up species protection catalogues, so that one of the criteria for the conservation of a species and its inclusion in one or another category of threat would be based on its functional role within an ecosystem and, moreover, on the value of the ecosystem services it provides and the negative consequences that would result from the loss of the functions associated with the role it plays in the ecosystem where it lives.

These losses of functionality resulting from the extinction of bird species that play a fundamental role as pest controllers, pollinators, seed dispersers, etc., could not only have fatal consequences in some ecosystems, which have not yet been very well studied, but also have serious socio-economic repercussions for humans.