An extinction crisis continues to ravage the planet's animals and plants, according to the new Red List of Threatened Species released today.
The elevated threat level has even sparked a Dow Jones-like index of endangered species, designed to spot troubled species before it's too late. But, despite the inevitable comparisons to the U.S. financial crisis, there appears to be no bailout plan in sight for threatened life-forms, experts say.
There are 44,838 species on the 2008 Red List, compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Thirty-eight percent of Red List species are close to extinction, with 25 percent of all mammals on the verge of oblivion.
The Red List is an annual "health check of the planet," IUCN director general Julia Marton-Lefèvre said.
For the 2008 list, for the first time, every known amphibian, mammal, and bird was assessed.
Species unlucky enough to make the list are grouped into eight categories, from "least concern" (low risk of extinction) to "critically endangered" (extremely high risk of extinction in the wild in the near term).
"If you look ahead a hundred years to our grandchildren and great grandchildren, how are they going to measure whether we were successful in our conservation efforts?" Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, asked a briefing at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona.
"Perhaps the most important basis is whether we really saved the full range of animals and plants and everything else out there."
Heightened Threat Levels
Among species whose status is downgraded on the new Red List, some are falling victim to disease, such as the Tasmanian devil.
The Australian marsupial saw a rapid fall from "least concern" to "endangered" status after an infectious facial cancer wiped out 60 percent of its population.
Also, the deadly chytrid fungus continues to threaten amphibians, which have hit a new low.
Thirty-two percent of all amphibians are now threatened or extinct, said Simon Stuart, chair of IUCN's Biodiversity Assessments Sub-committee. For example, Holdridge's toad of Costa Rica, previously listed as critically endangered, has now been deemed extinct.
But most species are plummeting because of habitat destruction, "the most significant threat to [land] species," Stuart said.
For instance, the newly listed, "critically endangered" Rameshwaram parachute spider—a tarantula species found only on the Indian island of Rameshwaram—has lost nearly all its habitat to plantation development.
Likewise, Asia's fishing cat, now labeled endangered, has suffered from the draining of its wetland territory for farms and settlements.
"Good News"
There are a few bright spots in the findings.
The La Palma giant lizard—presumed extinct for the past 500 years—has been rediscovered on La Palma island in the Canary Islands—"very good news," according to Stuart.
Overall, 5 percent of threatened mammals show signs of improvement in the wild, the report found.
For instance, North America's black-footed ferret and Przewalski's horse, a wild Mongolian subspecies, leaped from "extinct in the wild" to "endangered."
These two successes point to the potential of reintroduction programs to save species, Jan Schipper, of IUCN-Conservation International Global Mammal Assessment, told National Geographic News.
But reintroduction is not the most cost-effective strategy, Schipper added. Efforts should be made to stave off species extinction before the threat to a species reaches a critical level, he said.
"Dow Jones Index" for Species
As part of that effort to spot trouble early, IUCN and the Zoological Society of London have launched the sampled Red List Index, "which could be considered the Dow Jones Index for biodiversity," according to a press statement.
As in the Dow Jones approach to tracking stock market trends, a few individual "stocks" (in this case, species) are tracked as indicators of the overall health of the "market" (in this case, an overall taxon, or group of species—for example, reptiles).
The approach is also similar to election polling, in which the responses of a random sample are used to gauge trends.
"We need to know if things are getting better or getting worse. And when we have interventions, are they successful?" Jonathan Baillie, conservation-programs director for the zoological society, told National Geographic News.
Baillie and colleagues have already assessed reptiles and some invertebrate groups.
After adding the "Dow Jones" reptile data to the new Red List assessments of mammals and amphibians, he predicts that 24 percent of the world's land-dwelling vertebrates (animals with spines) may be under threat.
This initial use of the Dow Jones approach, "indicates that biodiversity is in peril," he said.
"And we don't see any [U.S.] $700-billion bailout plan on the horizon."
Quarter of species on Earth may face extinction: expert
Yahoo News 6 Oct 08;
A new tool for measuring biodiversity suggests that a quarter of all animal and plant species may be at risk of extinction, a top scientist said Monday.
Up to now, scientists have only been able to assess the survival status of a relative handful of species due to the sheer variety of life forms inhabiting the planet.
The newly updated "Red List" -- widely viewed as the global standard for conservation monitoring -- includes assessments of 44,838 species, mostly mammals, birds, amphibians and some plants.
But this is only a tiny fraction of the world's life forms, which almost certainly numbers in the tens of million, many of them microorganisms.
"The status of the rest of the world's biodiversity is very poorly known," Jonathan Baillie, director of conservation programmes at the Zoological Society of London, said at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona.
"The problem is the size of some of these groups -- how do you assess a million plus beetles?"
One way is to borrow a technique from opinion polls and stock market indices such as the Dow Jones or Nasdaq: a representative sampling.
"We have political, social and economic indices, but we lack broad biodiversity indices for the very things that underlie our existence," he said.
Scientists first tested the concept by assessing 1,500 randomly selected reptiles, much as survey institutes might poll a thousand likely voters before an election.
What they found was that about 22 percent of the world's reptiles could be in the process of dying out.
When that tally was added to what was already known about mammals, birds and amphibians, it turned out that 24 percent of the world's terrestrial vertebrates are threatened with extinction.
As scientists extended the method to other animal groups a larger pattern began to emerge as to the portion that are threatened: 14 percent of dragonflies, 32 of fresh water crabs, 33 of corals.
"There is great variation, but the question that emerges is whether 25 percent is representative of broader biodiversity," Baillie said.
"The idea that one-in-four of the world's species may be threatened with extinction does not seem unreasonable," Baillie said.
"We don't know yet because we have not assessed invertebrate groups and plant groups. But we have begun to do this," he added.
"The first attempt to do this indicated that biodiversity is truly in peril, but we don't see any 700 billion dollar bailout plan on the horizon."
The Congress, organised by International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), brings together more than 8,000 ministers, UN officials, NGOs, scientists and business chiefs to brainstorm on how to brake species loss and steer the world onto a path of sustainable development.
It runs from October 5 to 14.
Reptile loss threatens global biodiversity
The Independent 6 Oct 07;
More than a fifth of the world's reptiles are threatened with extinction, a new method of monitoring the fortunes of groups of species revealed today.
Instead of assessing each individual species to see if it is at risk of dying out, the Sampled Red List Index (SRLI) examines a sample of 1,500 species from a group such as reptiles, and uses it to model how groups are doing overall.
The method, which revealed 22 per cent of reptiles are at risk of extinction, can be used to track large groups such as insects, where it is not feasible to monitor every individual species.
Complete assessments have been done on all known bird, mammal and amphibian species - but they only make up around 2 per cent of the world's wildlife, according to Dr Jonathan Baillie, director of conservation programmes at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).
Other plants and animals are covered on the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species, but the picture is far from complete - which means conservation decisions are being made on the basis of knowledge of less than 4 per cent of the Earth's biodiversity.
The new index, which uses the IUCN's criteria for threatened species, is "an amazing tool for communicating the status of the world's biodiversity", he said.
It will enable conservationists to identify families of species which are under threat - for example the results showed 43 per cent of crocodiles were at risk of extinction - and also which ecosystems or parts of the world have high levels of at-risk wildlife.
Dr Baillie said: "This is a quantum leap forward in our understanding of biodiversity. The disadvantage is you can't look at all individual species, but to address the bigger problems we have to understand things at an ecosystem, or habitat, level.
"The index enables us to identify a family of species or region that is particularly threatened."
Adding the new data on reptiles to the assessments on birds, mammals and amphibians has revealed that a quarter (24 per cent) of the world's land-based vertebrate species are threatened with extinction.
The scheme, developed by ZSL and IUCN, will go on to sample other groups such as crayfish and lobsters, dung beetles, butterflies, freshwater molluscs and squid and octopuses.
The findings will feed into work toward halting the loss of global biodiversity by 2010.