Species Extinction Curves Under Emergent Spatiotemporal Land‐Use Processes and the Role of Protected Areas

ABSTRACT

Anthropogenic land‐use change is a major driver of biodiversity loss. Predicting the resulting extinction risk is essential for balancing development and conservation, yet remains challenging due to the lack of frameworks that integrate dynamic human activity with species' spatial distributions. In this study, we develop a spatially explicit model that couples land‐use progression with species range‐size distributions to estimate species extinctions. This framework captures the stochastic emergence, spatial expansion, and merging of converted areas over time, while accounting for species' spatial range structure. We use it to compare extinction risk across land‐use dynamics, geographic gradients, and protected‐area implementation scenarios. Using endemic‐area relationships (EARs) to evaluate immediate species loss, we found that frequent emergence of new, spatially dispersed land‐use patches shifted species loss toward later stages of habitat conversion, producing a sharper increase than in scenarios assuming expansion from a single location. However, because multi‐site conversion also accelerates land conversion in time, this conversion pattern may pose a greater real‐time risk to biodiversity. We also investigate the role of protected areas, finding that earlier implementation can significantly reduce extinctions, although the effectiveness varies depending on land‐use patterns. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating spatiotemporal land‐use processes into extinction models and emphasize the urgency of timely conservation strategies to mitigate biodiversity loss.