Article Source: Guangming Daily Section A60

Writer: Wu Chunyan

Reported on May 18th in Guangzhou “The extinction rate of species is actually lower than we thought.” Professor He Fangliang from School of Life and Science, SYSU, demonstrated the core idea of his paper ‘Species Area Curve has been Overestimating the Extinction Rate Caused by Loss of Habitats’, which was recently adopted by Nature magazine, on the press conference held in Sun Yat-sen University this afternoon.

Species extinction caused by loss of habitats and the measurement of extinction rate has become a significant difficulty globally. The most popular method at present ‘Retrospective Method of Species Area Curve’ calculates the extinction rate based on the area of destroyed habitats. After years of research Professor He Fangliang pointed out that the area needed to verify the extinction of one species is forever larger than what the species area curve shows. Thus the result calculated in this method overestimates the actual rate for around 160%.

Some scientists proposed the concepts of ‘Extinction Debts’ in order to justify the explanation of “high extinction rate”, which means that the species are bound to be extinct when they have suffered destruction. In fact, ‘extinction debts’ is a false proposition, largely because of the sample illusion, which means that the samples of species area curve distinguish fundamentally from those that enables the deduction of species extinction from habitats loss. However, He Fangliang agrees that the loss of habitats will lead to negative consequence of species extinction.