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Contributed Talk

Session: : Distributions And Range Limits 2

COS 235-2 - CANCELLED - Extinction debt and forest amount partly explain a latitudinal gradient in the proportion of species living in forests

Thursday, August 10, 2023
8:15 AM – 8:30 AM PDT
Location: D140
Abstract: Forests cover approximately thirty percent of the global land area, yet they provide habitat for over 70% of terrestrial species. It is well known that species richness of vertebrates declines with distance from the equator, but the degree to which proportions of species associated with major ecotypes (e.g., forest, grassland) follows the same pattern is unknown. A null expectation is that the proportion of forest species simply tracks with the total amount of forest in a region. However, parts of the globe may serve as “cradles” for rapid evolution of forest species given the lack of historical disturbances such as glaciation and frequent fire. Further, contemporary distributions of species may not have kept pace with anthropogenic forest loss (i.e., an extinction debt) resulting in a greater proportion of forest species than one would expect from current forest cover alone. Here we used range maps and habitat use data from BirdLife and IUCN to depict the global distribution of the proportion of forest vertebrate species (amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles). We found that the proportion of forest species increases with both current and historical forest cover, as well as historical disturbance, whilst decreasing with latitude. Our results suggest that even historically deforested areas still have an “extinction debt” of forest species to be paid. Whilst a decrease in forest species with increasing latitude appears to be consistent across taxa even when other variables are accounted for, suggesting that this is a general rule similar to the Latitudinal Biodiversity Gradient, whose underlying drivers are similarly still to be uncovered.