Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 106, Issue 30, Pages 12382-12387Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0900698106
Keywords
Amazon; deforestation; distrbutions; ecoregions; land-use changes
Categories
Funding
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Andes to Amazon Program
- National Science Foundation [DEB-0237684]
- Amazon Conservation Association
- Division Of Environmental Biology
- Direct For Biological Sciences [0743666] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Estimates of the number, and preferably the identity, of species that will be threatened by land-use change and habitat loss are an invaluable tool for setting conservation priorities. Here, we use collections data and ecoregion maps to generate spatially explicit distributions for more than 40,000 vascular plant species from the Amazon basin (representing more than 80% of the estimated Amazonian plant diversity). Using the distribution maps, we then estimate the rates of habitat loss and associated extinction probabilities due to land-use changes as modeled under 2 disturbance scenarios. We predict that by 2050, human land-use practices will have reduced the habitat available to Amazonian plant species by approximate to 12-24%, resulting in 5-9% of species becoming committed to extinction, significantly fewer than other recent estimates. Contrary to previous studies, we find that the primary determinant of habitat loss and extinction risk is not the size of a species' range, but rather its location. The resulting extinction risk estimates are a valuable conservation tool because they indicate not only the total percentage of Amazonian plant species threatened with extinction but also the degree to which individual species and habitats will be affected by current and future land-use changes.
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