Avtrex, a new global and open-access database created to determine how many bird species have been driven to extinction by human activity and what impact these losses have on biodiversity, was presented on Saturday, September 5, in Granada. The tool was unveiled during the 27th Spanish Ornithology Congress – 8th Iberian Congress, which brings together more than 400 researchers from Portugal and Spain.
The international scientific project counts on the participation of the Centre for Research in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources (CIBIO-InBIO) at the University of Porto and the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of the Azores, among other institutions. The database was presented by researcher Ferrán Sayol Altarriba, from the University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia, who argued that official statistics, such as the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, are insufficient to determine how many species disappeared due to human activity.
Avtrex brings together information on the ecological and morphological characteristics of birds extinct since the Late Pleistocene, combining studies published in the scientific literature with data from natural history collections. The scientific paper that presented the project, titled "The global loss of avian functional and phylogenetic diversity from anthropogenic extinctions," was published in October 2024 in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography and counted on the participation of Filipa Coutinho Soares, researcher at CIBIO-InBIO, among 20 other researchers.
The results indicate that extinctions caused by human activity did not affect species randomly, concentrating mainly on islands and hitting non-flying species with greater intensity. The research also concludes that species introduced by humans do not compensate for the lost diversity, actually contributing to making island communities more similar to each other.
