Online seminar by Dr. Ana Benitez Lopez from Department of Biogeography & Global Change (DBCG-MNCN-CSIC)
11 June 2026
KST 16:00
Join us online: https://pusan.zoom.us/j/81149941322?pwd=4kEHWnWIYQqDeoX1Bvcvls3HpEYI9a.1
Tropical forests are usually valued as carbon stores defined by their trees. Yet the animals within them quietly regulate how much carbon those forests can hold, and a largely invisible driver, overhunting, is steadily eroding that capacity. Forests that appear intact on satellite imagery are increasingly empty. In this talk I synthesize a decade of work quantifying the impacts of hunting and habitat loss on tropical mammals and birds. I first show how meta-analytical and spatial modelling approaches reveal pervasive hunting-induced declines across the tropics, for both mammals and birds, then turn to the synergistic interactions between habitat loss and hunting that amplify extinction risk beyond what either driver causes alone. I present efforts to map vulnerability to exploitation pantropically, identifying where and for which species risk is concentrated. I then show how these pressures reshape the structure and function of ecosystems. Average mammal body mass has fallen by roughly half relative to a human-free baseline, producing a biomass deficit of nearly 60 million tons and a shift in dominance from megafauna to rodents. These losses cascade into the functional composition of tropical tree communities, forest regeneration, and, critically, the carbon cycle: carbon stocks shift from long-lived large mammals to short-lived small ones, and from heavy-wooded, large-seeded trees toward small-seeded, wind-dispersed, carbon-poor species. Finally, I discuss how this science translates into climate-relevant conservation, culminating in the first pantropical spatial prioritization that integrates hunting vulnerability with the Kunming–Montreal 30×30 target while accounting for forest integrity and the rights of Indigenous and rural communities. Together, this work argues that defaunation is a spatially structured, synergistic driver of extinction risk whose effects propagate to whole-ecosystem function and the global carbon cycle – an Earth-system process that conservation and climate planning can no longer afford to overlook.
This Seminar will be held online.
The zoom link for the seminar is as below.
https://pusan.zoom.us/j/81149941322?pwd=4kEHWnWIYQqDeoX1Bvcvls3HpEYI9a.1
Meeting ID: 811 4994 1322
Passcode: 639926