New research has revealed that human activity is having a much greater toll on extinction levels than was previously thought. New research from Duke University, North Carolina reveals that extinction rates are between 10 and 100 times higher than in suggested in earlier studies, and around a thousand times higher than the pre-human background rate of extinction.  

The 'landmark' study, set for publication in Friday's edition of the journal Science, posits that there are 100 extinctions of plant and animal species per million species per year, but that this rate of extinction could be as high as 1000 per million per year, given that there are estimated to be millions of species biologists have yet to catalogue or discover.

These new species, when found, are often already threatened, having evolved to be highly specialised, and surviving only in small habitats under pressure as a result of human activity.   

The researchers also note that the background extinction rate, which had been estimated at 1 species per million per year twenty years ago, was in fact ten times too high, a finding that further amplifies the magnitude of humans' impacts. Although human-driven climate change is likely to lead to widespread extinctions over the coming years (between 10-14 percent of current land-based species are expected to be wiped out by global warming by 2050, according to previous research by Stuart Pimm, who led the Duke study), outright habitat destruction is currently driving most extinctions, though a range of factors often contribute to a species' eventual demise.

The Duke researchers said that, hopefully, rapid improvements in communications technology and cataloguing data can help target conservation efforts better, putting ecologists in a much better position to act each year that technology improves.  

In Britain, an online petition has been launched in the past week to ban driven grouse shooting, which its creator claims is having a marked effect on wildlife and the uplands environment. According to Dr Mark Avery, RSPB's head of conservation, intensive management of grouse shooting estates has led to the near-extinction of the Hen Harrier in England.

Dr Avery warns that, despite being a legally protected species, only two breeding pairs of hen harriers exist in England, largely the result of persecution by Grouse shooting interests, but that the government has so far failed to influence the powerful grouse shooting lobby. Former Defra minister Richard Benyon, a millionaire landowner whose portfolio includes both a grouse shoot and pheasant shoot, attracted criticism on numerous occasions while in office over his links to the shooting lobby.