Biodiversity conservation: From prairie dogs to global mammal extinction

Ever-increasing human impacts are causing devastating losses to Earth’s biodiversity. Here, I highlight how local-scale field studies to global-scale macroecology can complementarily inform biodiverisity conservation. I illustrate how research on prairie dogs, a keystone rodent in North America’s grasslands, provides new insights into how they can co-exist with human activities and help maintain grassland ecosystems, with implications for ecologically similar burrowing mammals in grasslands around the world. Scaling up further, I illustrate how macroecological research can inform which mammal species are at greatest risk, where and why, and help identify global priority areas for conservation.