Species loss is accelerating and has surpassed historic extinction rates. But how well do we actually capture extinctions and do we know how many species we have lost already?
In our new comment we argue that known extinctions are just the tip of the iceberg and many human-driven losses remain undocumented. We call this phenomenon “Dark Extinctions”, which describe extinctions absent from the IUCN Red List and hence biasing our view of biodiversity loss.
We propose 5 actions to improve our knowledge on extinctions:
- Investigate additional approaches to assess extinction risks: for example, measurable proxies, hierarchical models and group-level assessments
- Expand temporal coverage to include all anthropogenic extinctions, including consideration of the subfossil record
- Advance tools and mobilize data to reduce the fraction of species assessed as Data Deficient in the Red List
- Assess and, if necessary, revise Red List criteria so that they, as accurately as possible, reflect the number of extinctions in a rapidly changing world
- Recognize Dark Extinction explicitly in Red List assessments
Read more about Dark Extinctions and the individual actions to better capture your extinction knowledge in our new paper in Nature Reviews Biodiversity:
Essl F, Dullinger S, Rabitsch W, Burns KC, Foufopoulos J, Hulme PE, Jarić I, Katsanevakis S, Ladle RJ, Russell JC, Svenning J-C, Wood JR, Lenzner B (2026) Dark extinctions warrant recognition in Red Lists. Nature Reviews Biodiversity. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44358-026-00160-2
