The idea that several small, rather than a single large, habitat areas should hold the highest total species richness (the so-called SLOSS debate) brings into question the importance of habitat fragmentation to extinction risk. SLOSS studies are generally addressed over a short time scale, potentially ignoring the long-term dimension of extinction risk. Here, we provide the first long-term evaluation of the role of habitat fragmentation in species extinction, focusing on 22 large mammal species that lived in Eurasia during the last 200 000 years. By combining species distribution models and landscape pattern analysis, we compared temporal dynamics of habitat spatial structure between extinct and extant species, estimating the size, number and degree of the geographical isolation of their suitable habitat patches. Our results evidenced that extinct mammals went through considerable habitat fragmentation during the last glacial period and started to fare worse than extant species from about 50 ka. In particular, our modelling effort constrains the fragmentation of habitats into a narrow time window, from 46 to 36 ka ago, surprisingly coinciding with known extinction dates of several megafauna species. Landscape spatial structure was the second most important driver affecting megafauna extinction risk (ca 38% importance), after body mass (ca 39%) and followed by dietary preferences (ca 20%). Our results indicate a major role played by landscape fragmentation on extinction. Such evidence provides insights on what might likely happen in the future, with climate change, habitat loss and fragmentation acting as the main forces exerting their negative effects on biodiversity.

中文翻译：

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栖息地破碎化在欧亚大陆更新世巨型动物灭绝中的作用

几个小的而不是一个大的栖息地区域应该拥有最高的总物种丰富度（所谓的 SLOSS 辩论）的想法使栖息地破碎化对灭绝风险的重要性产生了质疑。SLOSS 研究通常在很短的时间范围内进行，可能会忽略灭绝风险的长期维度。在这里，我们首次对栖息地破碎化在物种灭绝中的作用进行了长期评估，重点关注过去 20 万年来生活在欧亚大陆的 22 种大型哺乳动物。通过结合物种分布模型和景观格局分析，我们比较了灭绝和现存物种栖息地空间结构的时间动态，估计了它们合适栖息地斑块的地理隔离的大小、数量和程度。我们的研究结果证明，灭绝的哺乳动物在最后一个冰期经历了相当大的栖息地破碎化，并且从大约 50 ka 开始比现存物种更糟糕。特别是，我们的建模工作将栖息地的分裂限制在一个狭窄的时间窗口内，从 46 到 36 ka 前，令人惊讶地与已知的几种巨型动物物种的灭绝日期一致。景观空间结构是影响巨型动物灭绝风险的第二大驱动因素（重要性约为 38%），仅次于体重（约为 39%），其次是饮食偏好（约为 20%）。我们的研究结果表明，景观破碎对灭绝起到了重要作用。这些证据提供了关于未来可能发生的事情的见解，随着气候变化，