The loss of Banks’s legacy

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Abstract
Sir Joseph Banks had a profound love for nature and would have been horrified to witness the destruction and modification of the world’s natural habitats since his time, particularly as his own exploration efforts and agricultural interests contributed directly to the colonization of Australia and many Pacific islands. Unprecedented population growth and huge changes in human mobility in the last 250 years have created a wave of extinctions of many plants and animals throughout the world. In an effort to assess Banks’s legacy and calculate rates of extinction on a historical timescale, we examine changes since 1740 to the birds, mammals and vascular plants of three areas: Australia, the Hawaiian Islands, and the British Isles.