Historical and potential extinction of shrub and tree species through deforestation in the department of Antioquia, Colombia

Abstract

We assessed the expected historical and current speciesrichness of shrubs and trees in the Department of Antioquia,northwest region of Colombia. We used the Fisher´s alpha valueassociated with the pooled dataset of identified species in 16 1-haplots that were used to extrapolate the scaled species richness ofthe Antioquia Province under three different scenarios: 1) the entireregion before deforestation began, assuming an original forestcover of around 92% of the entire province (excluding paramos,rivers, and lakes). 2) The forest cover in 2010. 3) The expected forestcover in 2100 assuming the observed deforestation rate between2000 and 2010 as a constant. We found that, despite relativelylow local and global losses of species, global extinctions in termsof number of species could be dramatically high due to the highendemism and deforestation rates.