Ecologists unveil plan for 'barometer of natural life'

Paper co-authored by E O Wilson calls for thousands of scientists to collect information on 160,000 species deemed representative of life on Earth
Juliette Jowit, guardian.co.uk 8 Apr 10;

An ambitious project to create a "barometer of life" to track the changing fortunes of the natural world will be set out tomorrow by some of the world's leading ecologists.

The plan is for thousands of scientists to collect information on 160,000 of the world's nearly 2 million known species - from great mammals, fish and birds to obscure insects and fungi - chosen to be representative of life on Earth.

The index would more than triple the scope of what is already the world's biggest scheme - the "red list" of extinct and endangered species published by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) - and would be updated every five years.

The cost of building the database would be about US$60m (£39.3m), but this would be "one of the best investments for the good of humanity," says the proposal, published in the journal Science and co-authored by the great American ecologist and writer E O Wilson.

The figures could be used to help companies carry out environmental impact assessments, allow national and international organisations to prioritise spending, and draw public attention to problems as a way of building support for policies to protect and improve biodiversity, said Simon Stuart, chair of the IUCN's species survival commission, and the paper's lead author.

"Just think of the other uses $60m are put to by the world, and the amount of money spent on wars or banks, or advertising," Stuart told the Guardian. "We can put our hands on our hearts and say this would be better for the good of humanity. First of all it's an indicator of the health of the planet. Secondly in many parts of the world people depend on biodiversity for food or clean water or living wages. Thirdly I'd say because of their intrinsic value: there's something inspirational about ecosystems and species being in good shape, and the diversity of it."

The idea – informally titled the "barometer of life" – is supported by the IUCN and nine partner organisations, including Kew Gardens in London, and the Zoological Society of London.

The IUCN's red list has so far assessed more than 47,000 species, but is heavily biased towards a few groups of animals – mammals, birds and amphibians – and does not adequately represent the whole of life on Earth, says the paper.

Only half of all vertebrates and "an extremely small proportion" of plants, invertebrates, fungi and other groups like seaweeds have been assessed, and species from marine, freshwater and arid environments are also "poorly covered", said Stuart.

"There are good reasons for believing you are going to get different results in different groups, which is why we have got to extend what we have got already," he added.

Using the hundreds of experts in the partner groups, and guidelines set down by the IUCN, Stuart estimates the first barometer could be published five years after receiving funding – probably from a private source. After that it could be updated every five years, for an annual cost of – at a "guess" - $5m, said Stuart, little more than is spent on the red list by global governments.

The headline figure for all life on Earth could be modelled on the IUCN's extinction risk rating of 0-1, where 0 is all species in the group are extinct, and 1 means there are no threats. In addition, the index could be broken down by region, species group, and by type of threat, said Stuart.

The 160,000 species proposed is a "provisional" figure, and includes almost all the nearly 65,000 species of vertebrates, and representative samples from the other groups. The scheme is being proposed to mark the International Year of Biodiversity in 2010.

Scientists have so far described 1.9 million of the estimated up to 10 million species of vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, fungi and other groups on Earth, and possibly tens of millions more bacteria and archeans.

Ten of the most endangered species in the world

Florida bonneted bat - Eumops floridanus was thought to be extinct until 2002, when a small colony was discovered in a North Fort Myers suburb of Florida, US.

Saola – The cow-like Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, which occurs only in the Annamite mountains of Vietnam and Laos is in protracted decline.

Kakapo or owl parrot - In 2008, the total population of this large, flightless nocturnal parrot (Strigops habroptila) from New Zealand was 93, including the seven hatched that year.

Golden arrow poison frog – With the chytridiomycosis epidemic spreading from west to east through Panama, populations of Atelopus zeteki are now at severe risk.

Jamaican iguana – There may be no more than a hundred adult Cyclura collei remaining in the wild, and juvenile recruitment appears to be minimal.

Chinese paddlefish - Only two adult specimens of Psephurus gladius (both females) have been recorded since 2002. It is expected there are fewer than 50 adults left in the wild.

Chinese giant salamander - The largest of all amphibian species, sometimes growing to more than 1m long, Andrias davidianus is widespread in southern China, but its range is very fragmented

Sicilian fir - Abies nebrodensis trees are presently limited to the steep, dry slopes of Mt. Scalone in the Madonie Mountains of Sicily.

Sumatran orang-utan - The majority of surviving Pongo abelii live in the province of Aceh in northern Sumatra, Indonesia.

Scientists call for biodiversity barometer
IUCN Press Release 8 Apr 10;

For the first time scientists have put a figure on how much it would cost to learn about the conservation status of millions of species, some of which have yet to be identified. The price tag is US$60 million, according to a team of scientists, including those from IUCN and Conservation International, who presented their case in this week’s Science magazine in an article called “The Barometer of Life.”

“Our knowledge about species and extinction rates remains very poor, and this has negative consequences for our environment and economy,” says Simon Stuart, Chair of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission. “By expanding the current IUCN Red List of Threatened SpeciesTM to include up to approximately 160,000 well-chosen species, we will have a good barometer for informing decisions globally.”

To date, almost 48,000 species have been assessed on the IUCN Red List, which costs about US$4 million each year. Most of this work is carried out by thousands of volunteers worldwide through the Species Survival Commission.

Globally, only 1.9 million species have been identified, though the estimated number of species is thought to be somewhere between 10 and 20 million. While the Red List contains assessments of all species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reef-building corals, freshwater crabs, cycads and conifers, the vast majority of the world’s species are poorly represented, including many plants, invertebrates, reptiles, fishes and fungi.

“The more we learn about indicator species (which can provide information on the quality of the environment around them), the more we know about the status of the living environment that sustains us all,” says Edward O. Wilson, a prominent biologist at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. “Threatened species, in particular, need to be targeted to enable better conservation and policy decisions.”

“We urgently need to ramp up current efforts to catalogue a far more representative selection of our vast biodiversity, while we still can, and we should focus first and foremost on those areas of highest extinction risk,” says Russell Mittermeier, President of Conservation International and Chair of IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group. “Such information will also help governments and communities to design appropriate responses to climate change and to other pressing conservation challenges.”

“Another important challenge is to strengthen scientific capacity for performing Red List assessments in biodiversity-rich areas. The developing world is home to most of the earth’s species, but human resources for monitoring this natural wealth are seriously lacking,” says Jon Paul Rodríguez, an ecologist at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Investigation and the Venezuelan NGO Provita, who serves as Deputy Chair of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission.

“The fact that we will not achieve the 2010 target to halt the loss of biodiversity is disheartening,” says Jeff McNeely, Senior Science Advisor, IUCN. “But complaining will not help nearly as much as a redoubled effort to conserve what remains of our planet’s living wealth. The Barometer of Life offers us an effective tool for measuring our progress towards saving life on earth.”

Media team:
Nicki Chadwick, Media Relations Officer, IUCN, t +41 22 999 0229, m +41 76 771 4208, e nicki.chadwick@iucn.org
Patricia Yakabe Malentaqui, Press Officer, Conservation International, t +1 703 341 2471, m +1 571 225 8345, e p.malentaqui@conservation.org

Note to Editors:

The authors of the Science article, “The Barometer of Life,” are: Simon Stuart, Chair of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission (SSC), Bath, UK; Edward O. Wilson, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Jeffrey A. McNeely, Senior Science Advisor, IUCN, Gland, Switzerland; Russell A. Mittermeier, President of Conservation International, Arlington, VA, USA, and Chair of the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group; Jon Paul Rodriguez, Centro de Ecología, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas, Caracas, Venezuela, and SSC Deputy Chair.

About the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™ (or the IUCN Red List) is the world’s most comprehensive information source on the global conservation status of plant and animal species. It is based on an objective system for assessing the risk of extinction of a species should no conservation action be taken.
Species are assigned to one of eight categories of threat based on whether they meet criteria linked to population trend, population size and structure and geographic range. Species listed as Critically Endangered, Endangered or Vulnerable are collectively described as ‘Threatened’.
The IUCN Red List is not just a register of names and associated threat categories. It is a rich compendium of information on the threats to the species, their ecological requirements, where they live, and information on conservation actions that can be used to reduce or prevent extinctions.

www.iucnredlist.org

About Conservation International

Building upon a strong foundation of science, partnership and field demonstration, Conservation International (CI) empowers societies to responsibly and sustainably care for nature for the well-being of humanity. With headquarters in Washington, DC, CI works in more than 40 countries on four continents.

www.conservation.org

How to Preserve the Breadth of Life on the Planet
New tools attempt to capture the sixth extinction currently underway, while also highlighting ways to stop it
David Biello Scientific American 9 Apr 10;

A barometer measures atmospheric pressure. Now a coalition of biologists is calling for a similar scientific tool to measure extinction pressure on Earth's biodiversity—a so-called "barometer of life".

After all, scientists have conclusively identified only a fraction of the species that exist on Earth; the roughly 1.9 million species catalogued to date may represent only 20 percent of the total biodiversity on the planet. "Species disappear before we know they existed," wrote biologists Simon Stuart, chair of the Species Survival Commission at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University, and others in the April 9 issue of Science, calling for an international effort to fund the creation of such a bio-barometer. Adds Stuart: "The point of conservation is to turn that negative trend into a positive trend."

The biologists propose to do that by spending $60 million to pull together all the known information to assess roughly 160,000 individual species from four groups: chordates (mammals and other vertebrates); invertebrates (insects and worms); plants; and fungi. The species would be assessed to identify which are suffering as a result of various extinction pressures: agricultural expansion and/or intensification; habitat changes; and climate change, among others. Such an assessment would give a better picture of the overall threat to biodiversity than do current efforts, according to the biologists. "There's an awful lot of information out there that we're not using because it's sitting in obscure places like museum jars," Stuart says.

Of course, 160,000 is only roughly 8 percent of known species—and the survey will not attempt to expand the rolls of living things, like the Encyclopedia of Life (an effort to catalogue all the species on the planet). "We're not going to be able to monitor the conservation status of nematodes anytime soon," Stuart admits. But "if the barometer shows a very major decline—as [the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species suggests already]—in mammals due to overhunting in Asia then that informs us what needs to be done."

As the aforementioned Encyclopedia and Red List suggest, the barometer would be only one of many such efforts, particularly given that this is the International Year of Biodiversity, according to the United Nations. But many of those efforts, including the IUCN's, cover even fewer species and betray a distinct bias toward charismatic megafauna like polar bears or bald eagles.

Other conservation groups take a different approach: The Nature Conservancy will release its Atlas of Global Conservation on April 22, which attempts to capture in maps the pressures faced by global habitats as well as the relative density of various species, such as amphibians. "By taking a habitat view, you're able to encompass all those species," says Conservancy senior scientist Jennifer Molnar. "It's a new view of the planet."

The new maps, which rely on collating everything from satellite data to field expeditions to fish species counts in specific locales, reveal that most areas of the world have already warmed as a result of climate change; almost all coastal ecosystems are now impacted by excess flows of nitrogen and other fertilizers, along with a decrease in sediment; and many regions of the world (if not all, because the rest lack sufficient data) now enjoy at least five invasive mammal species and three invading freshwater plants or animal species. "It's the first time to see how bad the problems are at a global scale," Molnar says. "We're not just damaging the environment, we're hurting ourselves…. The maps show that these resources are threatened beyond what we may realize."

The maps might show that current conservation efforts have failed, given that global species-saving efforts have grown as have the extent of protected habitats, although IUCN's Stuart rejects that claim. "Things would be going very much worse were it not for conservation measures," he says. "What we don't know at this stage is how much conservation has achieved." Given that Earth may be losing as many as 140,000 species a year—most of those nematodes and other uncharismatic microfauna—the question of how well conservation has worked to preserve biodiversity may soon be moot.