Data for: The role of habitat fragmentation in Pleistocene megafauna extinction in Eurasia by Mondanaro et al.

This dataset provides the complete list of data and necessary information
in order to reproduce all the analyses performed in the paper:
"Mondanaro, A., Di Febbraro, M., Melchionna, M., Maiorano, L., Di
Marco, M., Edwards, N.R., Holden, P.B., Castiglione, S., Rook, L., Raia,
P. (2021) The role of habitat fragmentation in Pleistocene megafauna
extinction in Eurasia. Ecography, online version" The idea that than
several small, rather than a single large, habitat areas, should hold the
highest total species richness (the so-called SLOSS debate) brings into
question the importance of habitat fragmentation to extinction risk. SLOSS
studies are generally addressed over a short time scale, potentially
ignoring the long-term dimension of extinction risk. Here, we provide the
first long-term evaluation of the role of habitat fragmentation in species
extinction, focusing on 22 large mammal species that lived in Eurasia
during the last 200,000 years. By combining species distribution models
and landscape pattern analysis, we compared temporal dynamics of habitat
spatial structure between extinct and extant species, estimating size,
number, and degree of geographical isolation of their suitable habitat
patches. Our results evidenced that extinct mammals went through
considerable habitat fragmentation during the last glacial period and
started to fare worse than extant species from about 50 ka. In particular,
our modelling effort constrains the fragmentation of habitats into a
narrow time window, from 46 to 36 kilo years ago, surprisingly coinciding
with known extinction dates of several megafauna species. Landscape
spatial structure was the second most important driver affecting megafauna
extinction risk (ca. 38% importance), after body mass (ca. 39%) and
followed by dietary preferences (ca. 20%). Our results indicate a major
role played by landscape fragmentation on extinction. Such evidence
provides insights on what might likely happen in the future, with climate
change, habitat loss, and fragmentation acting as the main forces exerting
their negative effects on biodiversity.