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  EurekAlert 6 Mar 06
Tomorrow's endangered species: Act now to protect species not yet under threat

National Geographic 6 Mar 06
Mammal-Extinction Danger Zones Revealed in New Map
Scott Norris for National Geographic News

A team of biologists has identified 20 hotspots around the world where mammal species, while not yet appearing threatened, are likely to be at high risk of extinction in decades to come.

Marcel Cardillo, a biologist at Imperial College in London, and his colleagues mapped areas where species appear safe today but may be seriously vulnerable to future changes.

"The potential importance of this is in identifying species or areas most likely to become threatened in the future, so we can take preventive action," Cardillo said.

The team isolated these regions by assessing which mammal species are most susceptible to human-caused disturbances, like pollution and habit destruction, as well as where such disturbances are currently taking place.

To illustrate the results, Cardillo's team produced a map showing the hotspots of this extinction risk. The map shows some unexpected patterns. Hotspots are concentrated in the far north--particularly in Alaska and northern Canada--and across much of southeast Asia from Sumatra and Borneo to New Guinea.

"This surprised us, because the two areas seemingly have little in common," Cardillo said. "What unites them is a high discrepancy between current and predicted risk."

The study appears in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Risk Assessment Global conservation efforts typically focus on identifying biodiversity hotspots--areas where many unique species are present and rates of habitat loss or other disturbance are high.


(See National Geographic map: priority areas for conservation.)

Such an approach makes sense for protecting the largest number of critically endangered species. But Cardillo's team argues that such hotspot-based planning alone may not be sufficiently far-sighted. That's because many species considered relatively safe today have the potential to leapfrog to the top ranks of endangerment in coming decades.

The authors call that potential for rapid future decline "latent extinction risk." "Species with a high latent risk of extinction are ones that are less threatened today than their biology suggests they could be," Cardillo said. Like a person carrying a latent or hidden disease, such animal populations are vulnerable even while appearing healthy, he explained.

To measure and compare latent risk among mammals, Cardillo's group created mathematical models using data on 25 biological traits from roughly 4,000 species. The scientists assigned each species a single numerical score representing its degree of inherent, biologically based vulnerability. They then assigned a second score reflecting each species' actual degree of endangerment, as shown by its position on a widely used conservation reference, the global Red List of Threatened Species, maintained by the World Conservation Union. The difference between these two numbers was the animal's latent extinction risk--the gap between the species' potential vulnerability and its real-world status.

By this formula, species that are already seen as critically endangered received relatively low scores for latent risk. Only those having the potential to be severely affected by human disturbance, but still seen as relatively safe, scored high.

To portray how the scores were distributed geographically, the scientists produced their own hotspot map. Among the 20 hotspots are the forests and tundra of northern Canada and Alaska, and the chain of islands stretching from Indonesia to the South Pacific. Other hotspots include the Bahamas, Tasmania, and the Patagonian coast of Argentina.

A New Look at Hotspots

Cardillo emphasizes that his study is not meant to supplant the existing concept of biodiversity hotspots. Global conservation groups have used hotspot mapping to help direct funding to protect unique and threatened areas.

Still, some conservationists see a danger in highlighting areas with relatively low biodiversity as priorities for conservation funding. Thomas Brooks, a biologist and planner for the Washington, D.C.-based group Conservation International, says that while the latent risk concept is important, mapping average scores across regions may be misleading.

"It gives the impression that polar regions with a few sensitive species are equivalent priorities to the tropical island hotspots in the Philippines and Indonesia that have hundreds of sensitive species and hundreds more already threatened," Brooks said.

Cardillo argues that it is important to know the sensitivity of different regions and mammal communities, regardless of the overall number of species present. He says his approach can help complement other strategies by pointing out in advance what areas are likely to become future conservation battlegrounds.

"There are still large areas of the world with relatively intact habitats, which will almost certainly come under pressure in the future," Cardillo said. "If human impact increases in coming decades, then we expect the latent risk to become realized and many species to become threatened."

EurekAlert 6 Mar 06
Tomorrow's endangered species: Act now to protect species not yet under threat

Conservationists should be acting now to protect mammals such as North American reindeer which risk extinction in the future as the human population grows, according to research published today.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals areas with the potential to lose species that are not presently in danger. Species in these 'hotspots' have a latent risk of extinction; that is, they are currently less threatened than their biology would suggest, usually because they inhabit regions or habitats still comparatively unmodified by human activity.

The new research shows that over the next few decades, many species currently deemed safe could leapfrog those deemed high risk to become highly threatened. The comprehensive Red List, prepared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural resources, classifies species according to categories of threat running from 'extinct' to 'least concern'.

Among the species with the highest latent extinction risk according to the new study are the North American reindeer, the musk ox, the Seychelles flying fox, and the brown lemur.

Dr Marcel Cardillo, from the Division of Biology at Imperial College London and lead author of the research, said: "We can see this leapfrogging 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. We hope conservationists will use our findings to pre-empt future species losses rather than concentrating solely on those species already under threat."

The researchers identified species with the highest latent risks by comparing their current extinction risk and the risk predicted from their biological traits. Particular biological indicators of elevated risk in a species were large body mass, a low rate of reproduction and geographical restriction to a small part of the world.

The research reveals the top twenty hotspots for latent extinction risk in mammals, which include New Guinea, with the greatest latent risk; the Indian Ocean islands; Borneo; and Northern Canada and Alaska (For full list see Notes to Editors).

The hotspots combine relatively low human impact with a mammal fauna made up of species which are inherently sensitive to disturbance. The research takes into account the projected human population growth in these areas up to 2015.

Professor Andy Purvis, also from Imperial's Division of Biology and a co-author of the research, added: "Most conservation resources are spent in regions where the conflict between people and the natural system is entrenched. That's understandable, because we can see the damage that we are doing and we want to put it right, but repairing damage tends to be very expensive.

"Latent risk hotspots might provide cost-effective options for conservation; they're places that are relatively intact, and preventing damage is likely to be cheaper and more effective than trying to repair it," he said.

Latent risk is particularly low in many parts of the world already modified by human activity, such as Europe, Japan and New Zealand. Here, human impact has already been felt meaning that there are comparatively few surviving species with high latent risk.

The work was carried out by Imperial researchers in collaboration with scientists from the Zoological Society of London and the University of Virginia.

BBC 7 Mar 06
Stopping the next extinction wave
By Richard Black Environment Correspondent, BBC News website

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 believes its work will help conservationists prevent extinctions through early intervention - prevention, not cure. It is reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The study 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

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 is such that most conservation programmes will inevitably be reactive."

Some "last-chance" programmes have proved successful. In Yellowstone National Park, grizzly bears have recovered 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.
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