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Dynamics of extinction debt across five taxonomic groups

Species extinction following habitat loss is well documented. However, these extinctions do not happen immediately. The biodiversity surplus (extinction debt) declines with some delay through the process of relaxation. Estimating the time constants of relaxation, mainly the expected time to first ex...

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Autores principales: Halley, John M., Monokrousos, Nikolaos, Mazaris, Antonios D., Newmark, William D., Vokou, Despoina
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4962471/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27452815
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12283
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author Halley, John M.
Monokrousos, Nikolaos
Mazaris, Antonios D.
Newmark, William D.
Vokou, Despoina
author_facet Halley, John M.
Monokrousos, Nikolaos
Mazaris, Antonios D.
Newmark, William D.
Vokou, Despoina
author_sort Halley, John M.
collection PubMed
description Species extinction following habitat loss is well documented. However, these extinctions do not happen immediately. The biodiversity surplus (extinction debt) declines with some delay through the process of relaxation. Estimating the time constants of relaxation, mainly the expected time to first extinction and the commonly used time for half the extinction debt to be paid off (half-life), is crucial for conservation purposes. Currently, there is no agreement on the rate of relaxation and the factors that it depends on. Here we find that half-life increases with area for all groups examined in a large meta-analysis of extinction data. A common pattern emerges if we use average number of individuals per species before habitat loss as an area index: for mammals, birds, reptiles and plants, the relationship has an exponent close to a half. We also find that the time to first determined extinction is short and increases slowly with area.
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spelling pubmed-49624712016-09-06 Dynamics of extinction debt across five taxonomic groups Halley, John M. Monokrousos, Nikolaos Mazaris, Antonios D. Newmark, William D. Vokou, Despoina Nat Commun Article Species extinction following habitat loss is well documented. However, these extinctions do not happen immediately. The biodiversity surplus (extinction debt) declines with some delay through the process of relaxation. Estimating the time constants of relaxation, mainly the expected time to first extinction and the commonly used time for half the extinction debt to be paid off (half-life), is crucial for conservation purposes. Currently, there is no agreement on the rate of relaxation and the factors that it depends on. Here we find that half-life increases with area for all groups examined in a large meta-analysis of extinction data. A common pattern emerges if we use average number of individuals per species before habitat loss as an area index: for mammals, birds, reptiles and plants, the relationship has an exponent close to a half. We also find that the time to first determined extinction is short and increases slowly with area. Nature Publishing Group 2016-07-25 /pmc/articles/PMC4962471/ /pubmed/27452815 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12283 Text en Copyright © 2016, Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
spellingShingle Article
Halley, John M.
Monokrousos, Nikolaos
Mazaris, Antonios D.
Newmark, William D.
Vokou, Despoina
Dynamics of extinction debt across five taxonomic groups
title Dynamics of extinction debt across five taxonomic groups
title_full Dynamics of extinction debt across five taxonomic groups
title_fullStr Dynamics of extinction debt across five taxonomic groups
title_full_unstemmed Dynamics of extinction debt across five taxonomic groups
title_short Dynamics of extinction debt across five taxonomic groups
title_sort dynamics of extinction debt across five taxonomic groups
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4962471/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27452815
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12283
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