26 research outputs found
Humans and Ecosystems Over the Coming Millennia: Overview of a Biosphere Assessment of Radioactive Waste Disposal in Sweden
Early Weichselian interstadial deposits within the drumlins at Skrea and Vinberg, southwestern Sweden
Holocene land uplift and its influence on fire history and ecosystem development in boreal Sweden
Data from: Biotic and abiotic drivers of species loss rate in isolated lakes
1. Today, anthropogenic impacts are causing a serious crisis for global biodiversity, with rates of extinction increasing at an unprecedented rate. Extinctions typically occur after a certain delay and understanding the mechanisms causing delays is a key challenge for both fundamental and applied perspectives. 2. Here, we make use of natural experiments, the isolation of lakes by land up-lift in Northern Scandinavia, to examine how yearly extinction rates are affected by time since isolation and a range of abiotic and biotic factors. 3. In this aim, we adapted a model of delayed species loss within isolated communities to test the effects of time since isolation, area, pH, depth and presence/absence of piscivores on extinction rates. 4. As expected, we found that small and/or young lakes experience a higher annual rate of extinctions per species than larger and/or older ones. Compared to previous studies that were conducted for either young (few thousand years ago) or very old (>10 000 years ago) isolates, we demonstrated over a large and continuous temporal scales (50-5000 yr), similar relationship between extinction rates and age. We also show that extinction rates are modified by local environmental factors such as a strong negative effect of increasing pH. 5. Our results urge for the need to consider the time since critical environmental changes occurred when studying extinction rates. In a wider perspective our study demonstrates the need to consider extinction debts when modeling future effects of climate change, land-use changes, or biological invasions on biodiversity