Times to Extinction for Small Populations of Large Birds (Crow/Owl/Hawk/Population Lifetime/Population Size) STUART L
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA Vol. 90, pp. 10871-10875, November 1993 Population Biology Times to extinction for small populations of large birds (crow/owl/hawk/population lifetime/population size) STUART L. PIMM*, JARED DIAMONDt, TIMOTHY M. REEDt, GARETH J. RUSSELL*, AND JARED VERNER§ *Department of Zoology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996; tDepartment of Physiology, University of California Medical School, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1751; tJoint Nature Conservation Committee, Monkstone House, Peterborough, PE1 1UA, United Kingdom; and §U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, Fresno, CA 93710 Contributed by Jared Diamond, August 9, 1993 ABSTRACT A major practical problem in conservation such counts. European islands provide the most extensive biology is to predict the survival times-"lifetimes"-for small existing data set, and hence the best surrogates for 'Alala and populations under alternative proposed management regimes. Spotted Owl populations for the foreseeable future. The data Examples in the United States include the 'Alala (Hawaiian consist of counts of nesting birds tabulated in the annual Crow; Corvus hawaiiensis) and Northern Spotted Owl (Strix reports of bird observatories on small islands around the occidentalis caurina). To guide such decisions, we analyze coasts of Britain and Ireland, and on the German North Sea counts of ail crow, owl, and hawk species in the most complete island of Helgoland. Subsets of these data have been ana- available data set: counts of bird breeding pairs on 14 Euro- lyzed previously (2-9). pean islands censused for 29-66 consecutive years. The data set Our paper expands the previously analyzed data set to yielded 129 records for analysis.
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