Smaller habitats worse than expected for biodiversity
Wednesday, July 29, 2020 - 21:20
in Biology & Nature
Biodiversity's ongoing global decline has prompted policies to protect and restore habitats to minimize animal and plant extinctions. However, biodiversity forecasts used to inform these policies are usually based on assumptions of a simple theoretical model describing how the number of species changes with the amount of habitat. A new study shows that the application of this theoretical model underestimates how many species go locally extinct when habitats are lost.