Two centuries of biodiversity discovery and loss in Singapore.

There is an urgent need for reliable data on the impacts of deforestation on tropical biodiversity. The city-state of Singapore has one of the most detailed biodiversity records in the tropics, dating back to the turn of the 19th century. In 1819, Singapore was almost entirely covered in primary forest, but this has since been largely cleared.

Extinction rate of discovered and undiscovered plants in Singapore.

Extinction is a key issue in the assessment of global biodiversity. However, many extinction rate measures do not account for species that went extinct before they could be discovered. The highly developed island city-state of Singapore has one of the best-documented tropical floras in the world.

Species-area relationships and biodiversity loss in fragmented landscapes.

To estimate species loss from habitat destruction, ecologists typically use species-area relationships, but this approach neglects the spatial pattern of habitat fragmentation. Here, we provide new, easily applied, analytical methods that place upper and lower bounds on immediate species loss at any spatial scale and for any spatial pattern of habitat loss. Our formulas are expressed in terms of what we name the 'Preston function', which describes triphasic species-area relationships for contiguous regions.