In my opinion the "winners" will be today's generalist and cosmopolitan species. They will be able to survive in harder circumstances than the species we have to preserve.

If we talk about taxonomic groups, classes and sub-classes of Arthropoda will be able to adapt quickly to changed circumstances. Lots of them have shorter generation periods and great genetic diversity which are vital features of survival in rapidly changing environments.

The biggest "losers" will be mammals as I see, due to the lack of these two traits.

A possible prediction method will be the monitoring of species and groups which are able to adapt to urbanised and intensive agricultural habitats. The other  - and this is related to the previous one - possibility is assess the possible "shelter" function of the said habitats (e.g. fishing lakes, urban parks, greenways).

With these knowledge we will not only be able to predict the consequences but to buffer them a little bit in favour of the species we would like to save from extinction.

Hi Kenneth

I think you're mixing up two different things here: the rate at which species disappear, and the rate at which us scientist describe some of the existing ones and grant them a name.

The advances in genomics and high throughput sequencing technologies make it faster now to identify new species. However, recent estimates state that 80 % of the species present on earth are not yet described (see refs in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_biodiversity)... and a good deal of them might become extinct before we get a chance to name them.

The fact that taxonomists are now more efficient to describe species than they were in the (not so distant) past thanks to new technologies does not say anything about the species extinction rates... and hence neither about the reality or not of a ongoing massive extinction event.

Furthermore, I think your estimate of 150 species becoming extinct in the last 120 years or so is a gross underestimation, for two reasoins. First, it probably takes into account only the 'megafauna' species, that is large vertebrates with high visibility and patrimonial appeal. However, vertebrates (52 000 species) represent only about 3 % of the 1 750 000 species described so far. second, a recent paper (http://www.techtimes.com/articles/64542/20150630/humans-cause-of-extinction-of-nearly-500-species-since-1900.htm) rates at 500 rather than 150 the number of vertebrate species extinct since 1900 and whose extinction is attributed to man. This extinction rate is considerably higher than the 'baseline' one (see http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/5/e1400253).

Then, assuming comparable extinction rates across all taxa ( which is certainly a bold underestimation, as vertebrates tend to be much more protected now  and at least since the 1960s than any other group of living beings), and assuming that about 14 million species exist on Earth, it is actually 140 000 species that would have gone extinct since 1900. I guess the actual figure is probably considerably higher.