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Abstract
Intensification or abandonment of agricultural land use has led to a severe decline of semi-natural habitats across Europe. This can cause immediate loss of species but also time-delayed extinctions, known as the extinction debt. In a pan-European study of 147 fragmented grassland remnants, we found differences in the extinction debt of species from different trophic levels. Present-day species richness of long-lived vascular plant specialists was better explained by past than current landscape patterns, indicating an extinction debt. In contrast, short-lived butterfly specialists showed no evidence for an extinction debt at a time scale of c. 40 years. Our results indicate that management strategies maintaining the status quo of fragmented habitats are insufficient, as time-delayed extinctions and associated co-extinctions will lead to further biodiversity loss in the future.
Highlights
Loss of biodiversity is a worldwide concern
We found that habitat-specialized vascular plants, but not butterflies, showed an extinction debt over a time frame of 36–49 years of rapid habitat loss
Our data indicate the existence of an extinction debt for plant specialists in European semi-natural grasslands
Summary
Loss of biodiversity is a worldwide concern. One primary cause of species loss is habitat destruction and fragmentation (Tilman et al 2001), but the rate of extinctions might be accelerated due to other causes such as invasion by alien species, overexploitation, climate change, habitat deterioration and extinction cascades (Diamond 1989; Thomas et al 2004a; Brook et al 2008; Dunn et al 2009). Extinction processes often occur with a time delay and populations living close to their extinction threshold might survive for long time periods before they go extinct (Brooks et al 1999; Hanski & Ovaskainen 2002; Lindborg & Eriksson 2004; Helm et al 2006; Vellend et al 2006) This time delay in extinction is called the Ôrelaxation timeÕ (Diamond 1972) and the phenomenon that declining populations will eventually go extinct in fragmented or degraded habitats has been described as an Ôextinction debtÕ (Tilman et al 1994; Kuussaari et al 2009). Our understanding of the occurrence and ubiquity of extinction debts across ecosystems and taxonomic groups is highly incomplete and neither temporal nor spatial scales at which extinction debts occur are well known
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