FAUNAL COLLAPSE IN EAST-AFRICAN GAME RESERVES REVISITED

Soule et al. (Biol. Conserv., 1979, 15, 259-72) predicted that without intensive management, East African game reserves would lose a large proportion of their large mammal faunas if they became completely insularized (isolated from other habitat areas with healthy wildlife populations). They based their predictions on the loss of large mammal species from islands in the Malay archipelago following their insularization at the end of the Pleistocene. This paper considers the difficulty of estimating extinction rates from existing data and the paucity of data on the relationship between extinction rates and area. Re-analysing the Malay archipelago data, I find that insularized reserves may lose species even more rapidly than Soule et al. predicted.