Five centuries ago, maritime technology experienced significant improvements that allowed European peoples to travel to almost any corner of the planet, especially to oceanic islands. This resulted in large and irreversible ecological modifications of the visited lands, including major landscape disturbances and the extinction of many native species. Since then, anthropogenic extinction has not stopped but, on the contrary, has been magnified worldwide due to generalized overexploitation of natural resources, habitat destruction/fragmentation, and other destructive alterations, which have led to an outstanding biodiversity depletion usually referred to as the current anthropogenic biodiversity crisis. It has also been anticipated that ongoing global change will contribute to exacerbating anthropogenic extinction in the near future. A couple of decades ago, some scientists suggested that the ongoing anthropogenic biodiversity crisis could have the magnitude of a mass extinction similar to those that occurred in past geologic times, especially the five major mass extinctions, and coined the term “sixth extinction” (Leakey & Levin, 1995). This term and its equivalent “sixth mass extinction” have become popular in both scientific and nonscientific environments and are frequently used by scientists, environmentalists, popular writers, and journalists, among others.
