14 Facts About Extinction debt

In ecology, extinction debt is the future extinction of species due to events in the past.

Extinction debt occurs because of time delays between impacts on a species, such as destruction of habitat, and the species' ultimate disappearance.

Technically, extinction debt generally refers to the number of species in an area likely to become extinct, rather than the prospects of any one species, but colloquially it refers to any occurrence of delayed extinction.

Term extinction debt was first used in 1994 in a paper by David Tilman, Robert May, Clarence Lehman and Martin Nowak, although Jared Diamond used the term "relaxation time" to describe a similar phenomenon in 1972.

Extinction debt is known by the terms dead clade walking and survival without recovery when referring to the species affected.

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In discussions of threats to biodiversity, extinction debt is analogous to the "climate commitment" in climate change, which states that inertia will cause the earth to continue to warm for centuries even if no more greenhouse gasses are emitted.

Extinction debt is caused by many of the same drivers as extinction.

Extinction debt's analysis focused on marine molluscs since they constitute the most abundant group of fossils and are therefore the least likely to produce sampling errors.

One of the assumptions underlying the original extinction debt model was a trade-off between species' competitive ability and colonization ability.

Later models showed that extinction debt could occur in systems where habitat destruction occurs in small areas within a large area of habitat, as in slash-and-burn agriculture in forests, and could occur due to decreased growth of species from pollutants.

Models that incorporate stochasticity, or random fluctuation in populations, show extinction debt occurring over different time scales than classic models.

Processes that drive extinction debt are inherently slow and highly variable, and it is difficult to locate or count the very small populations of near-extinct species.

Forests in Flemish Brabant, Belgium, show evidence of extinction debt remaining from deforestation that occurred between 1775 and 1900.

Extinction debt has been found among species of butterflies living in the grasslands on Saaremaa and Muhu – islands off the western coast of Estonia.