Despite the paucity of studies quantifying drift, it has been demonstrated that human impacts can increase the overall importance of stochastic processes, which include drift, in both freshwater and terrestrial systems. For example, species losses, nutrient addition, and warming all increased the relative importance of stochastic processes in soil microbial communities (Zhang et al. 2016). Similarly, warming and nutrient addition increased the relative contribution of stochasticity–mainly caused by drift–among lake bacterioplankton communities (Ren et al. 2017). More generally and as mentioned above, we can expect that drift and drift-related extinctions will be greater in more isolated and smaller communities (Hubbell 2001; Vellend 2016). Thus, any anthropogenic changes which reduce community size and increase isolation (e.g., habitat fragmentation or land-use change) should tend to increase the contribution of drift to community dynamics (Melbourne & Hastings 2008). For example, biological invasions can cause decreased population sizes and thereby increase species vulnerability to stochastic extinctions (Gilbert & Levine 2013). Looking forward, a greater focus on the contribution of drift to community dynamics is warranted, as it is highly understudied but likely very important for shaping human impacts in both ecosystems.