Scientist: Species going extinct slower

GUANGZHOU - Scientists have been convinced for a long time that living species are going extinct at an alarmingly fast rate in the modern world.

While many are desperately trying to slow the losses, He Fangliang, a Chinese ecologist, is criticizing the current way of predicting how fast such losses will occur. His conclusions were published in the science magazine Nature on Thursday.

"A lot of factors such as deforestation, climate change and over-exploitation have led to an extreme rate of extinction," said He, who is an ecologist at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. "And the traditional method of predicting the rate of species loss is flawed."