Extinction—or just unseen? What Centinela reveals about biodiversity data gaps

Extinction—or just unseen? What Centinela reveals about biodiversity data gaps

In 1991, botanists Calaway Dodson and Alwyn Gentry advanced a striking proposition. Surveying a rapidly deforested ridge in western Ecuador, they suggested that dozens of plant species known only from that site—Centinela—had likely vanished with the forest. The idea was later distilled into the “Centinelan extinction hypothesis”: that habitat clearing can trigger the immediate, global extinction of narrowly distributed species. It was a powerful…