STOPPING THE NEXT EXTINCTION WAVE

[Anonymous]

Stopping the next extinction wave
We
hope conservationists will use our findings to pre-empt future species
losses rather than concentrating solely on those species already under
threat
Conservationists are being urged to focus on prevention rather than cure.
A
scientific study pinpoints 20 areas in the world where animals are not
at immediate risk of extinction, but where the risk is likely to arise
soon.
The regions include Greenland and the Siberian tundra, Caribbean islands and parts of South-East Asia.
The
London-based research team say they hope their work will help
conservationists prevent extinctions through early intervention.
The
study, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(PNAS), concentrates on a concept called “latent extinction risk”.
This
means animals are not under threat right now, and may not be classified
as in danger according to the Red List, the internationally-accepted
database of threatened species.
But the pattern of human development
means they could be sent on a fast track to extinction in the near
future, perhaps overtaking other species currently in higher-risk
classifications.
“We can see this leap-frogging happening now, for
example with the Guatemalan howler monkey, which was classified as
being on the ‘least concern’ list in 2000 but which moved to the
‘endangered’ list in 2004 as it lost much of its forest habitat,” said
study leader Dr Marcel Cardillo from Imperial College London.
“We
hope conservationists will use our findings to pre-empt future species
losses rather than concentrating solely on those species already under
threat.”Ox and reindeer
Proactive solutions tend to be cheaper and easier
Thomas Brooks
The scientists calculated the latent extinction risk for more than 1,500 non-marine mammals.
Re-inforcing
the conclusions of other groups, they find that species at particular
risk tend to have relatively large bodies, live in small areas and
reproduce relatively slowly; these include, they say, the North
American reindeer, the musk ox, the Seychelles flying fox and the brown
lemur.
Perhaps surprisingly, areas identified as containing species
with a particularly large latent extinction risk exclude well-known
biodiversity hotspots such as the Amazon and Congo basins, and include
sub-Polar regions in northern Canada, northern Russia and Greenland.
“I
am surprised that paper doesn’t pick up the Amazon and Congo basins,
regions where there is a large number of animal species with small
ranges,” observed Thomas Brooks of the Center for Applied Biodiversity
Science (CABS) in Washington DC, a division of Conservation
International.
One reason for this may be poor information. Some
databases of plants and animals are badly in need of revision – a flaw
which scientific groups led by IUCN, the World Conservation Union, are
trying to address through improving background studies of various
species and ecosystems.
Ahead of the curve
Conservation
International is one of a number of groups which already tries to mount
“preventative” programmes rather than waiting until very few members of
a species remain.
“It’s widely recognised among conservation
practitioners that wherever we have the opportunity we should get ahead
of the curve and implement proactive conservation measures,” Dr Brooks
told the BBC News website.
“Proactive solutions tend to be cheaper and easier.
“But the magnitude of human impacts on biodiversity are such that most conservation programmes will inevitably be reactive.”
Some
“last-chance” programmes have proved successful. In Yellowstone
National Park, grizzly bears have recovered far enough to come off the
US endangered species list; while in the UK, numbers of stone curlew
breeding pairs have doubled over the last 20 years.|
Through the
Convention on Biological Diversity, the international community has set
itself the goal of making a “substantial reduction in the rate of loss
of biological diversity” by 2010.
But overall, extinctions are
coming at 100 to 1,000 times the normal background rate, according to
the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a vast attempt to audit the
Earth’s ecological health which was published last year.
It concluded that a third of all amphibians, a fifth of mammals and an eighth of all birds are now threatened with extinction.
It also concluded that although humanity is the cause, humanity will ultimately be among the losers.
Reducing
biodiversity will, it says, impact societies at a number of levels,
including diminishing the availability of economically valuable natural
goods such as timber and compromising “ecosystem services” such as
fresh water and biodegrading bacteria.

1: Northern Canada and Alaska
2: Greenland
3: Siberian tundra
4: Eastern Canadian forests
5: Bahamas
6: East Indian highlands
7: Southern Polynesia
8: Lesser Antilles
9: Andaman and Nicobar Islands    
10: Borneo, Sulawesi and the Moluccas
11: New Guinea
12: Patagonian coast
13: Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra and West Java
14: Nusa Tengarra
15: Tasmania and the Bass Strait
16: Melanesia

[Author]

March 22, 2006 at 11:59 AM