Species-area relationships and biodiversity loss in fragmented landscapes

To estimate species loss from habitat destruction, ecologists typically use species-area relationships, but this approach neglects the spatial pattern of habitat fragmentation. Here, we provide new, easily applied, analytical methods that place upper and lower bounds on immediate species loss at any spatial scale and for any spatial pattern of habitat loss. Our formulas are expressed in terms of what we name the 'Preston function', which describes triphasic species-area relationships for contiguous regions. We apply our method to case studies of deforestation and tropical tree species loss at three different scales: a 50 ha forest plot in Panama, the tropical city-state of Singapore and the Brazilian Amazon. Our results show that immediate species loss is somewhat insensitive to fragmentation pattern at small scales but highly sensitive at larger scales: predicted species loss in the Amazon varies by a factor of 16 across different spatial structures of habitat loss.