Selective extinctions resulting from random habitat destruction lead to under‐estimates of local and regional biodiversity loss in a manipulative field experiment

Land-use change is a significant cause of anthropogenic extinctions, which are likely to continue and accelerate as habitat conversion proceeds in most biomes. One way to understand the effects of habitat loss on biodiversity is through improved tools for predicting the number and identity of species losses in response to habitat loss. There are relatively few methods for predicting extinctions and even fewer opportunities for rigorously assessing the quality of these predictions. In this paper we address these issues by applying a new method based on rarefaction to predict species losses after random, but aggregated, habitat loss. We compare predictions from three rarefaction models, individual-based, sample-based, and spatially-clustered, to those derived from a commonly-used extinction estimation method, the Species-Area Relationship (SAR). We apply each method to a mesocosm experiment, in which we aim to predict species richness and extinctions of arthropods immediately following 50...