Collapse of terrestrial mammal food webs since the Late Pleistocene

• DOI: 10.1126/science.abn4012
• Publication Date: 2022-08-25T17:58:57Z
• Authors: Evan C. Fricke; Chia Hsieh; Owen Middleton; Daniel Gorczynski; Caroline D. Cappello; Oscar Sanisidro; John Rowan; Jens-Christian Sv...; Lydia Beaudrot
• Keywords: Defaunation; Mammal; Trophic cascade

Food webs influence ecosystem diversity and functioning. Contemporary defaunation has reduced food web complexity, but simplification caused by past is difficult to reconstruct given the sparse paleorecord of predator-prey interactions. We identified changes terrestrial mammal globally over ~130,000 years using extinct extant traits, geographic ranges, observed interactions, deep learning models. underwent steep regional declines in complexity through loss links after arrival expansion human populations. estimate that a 53% decline globally. Although extinctions explain much this effect, range losses for species degraded similar extent, highlighting potential restoration via recovery.