Unpaid extinction debts for endemic plants and invertebrates as a legacy of habitat loss on oceanic islands

摘要

Aim: The majority of documented extinctions world-wide in the last four centuries are of species endemic to islands. However, the phenomenon of delayed extinctions as a result of habitat loss has rarely been assessed on oceanic islands. In this study, we tested whether extinction debt (ED), in general, occurs on islands and for which taxonomical groups this phenomenon is most pronounced by assessing ED for multiple endemic taxa and for each of the main altitudinal ecosystems in a well-studied oceanic archipelago.