Historical and potential extinction of shrub and tree species through deforestation in the department of Antioquia, Colombia

We assessed the expected historical and current species richness of shrubs and trees in the Department of Antioquia, northwest region of Colombia. We used the Fishers alpha value associated with the pooled dataset of identified species in 16 1-ha plots that were used to extrapolate the scaled species richness of the Antioquia Province under three different scenarios: 1) the entire region before deforestation began, assuming an original forest cover of around 92% of the entire province (excluding paramos, rivers, and lakes). 2) The forest cover in 2010. 3) The expected forest cover in 2100 assuming the observed deforestation rate between 2000 and 2010 as a constant. We found that, despite relatively low local and global losses of species, global extinctions in terms of number of species could be dramatically high due to the high endemism and deforestation rates.