Habitat loss leads to extinction of species, both immediately upon habitat clearing, and gradually while an âextinction debtâ is repaid. Predicting such species losses requires understanding the interplay of community dynamics and habitat structure across temporal and spatial scales. This has proved challenging to treat analytically and problematic species-area relationship approaches have prevailed. Here we develop new analytical results, based on a mechanistic model, for estimating species losses in response to habitat loss. We find...