Species extinction rates, as a result of human activity, have resulted in what is widely considered to be the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on earth. Understanding what makes species vulnerable to extinction, and identifying populations with high threat of extinction is vital for understanding and preventing biodiversity loss. Most of what we know about extinction risk concerns species in isolation. However, species do not exist in isolation but are part of complex food webs. The interactions between species in these webs means that each species can affect the extinction risk of others. The problem is that ecological risk indicators largely ignore this potential for effects of environmental change to spread through a food web like ripples on the surface of water. This project will focus on the problem of understanding the role of interactions with other species, for the likelihood of species extinctions. Extinction is hard to study systematically in the field, and this is especially true where whole community effects are involved. For this reason we propose an experimental study of extinctions using microbial ecosystems in the laboratory, allowing extinction effects to be investigated through direct experiments. The application of the results to the design of ecological risk indicators will be realised by applying currently used `real world´ indicators to the experimental data, to help identify when and how existing risk indicators may be improved. This part of the research will take place at the CASE partner institute, the Zoological Society of London
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