Mammal Conservation Battlegrounds of the Future

LONDON, UK, March 7, 2006 (ENS) - Large mammals such as North American reindeer are not now endangered, but they may be at highest risk of extinction in the future as the human population grows, finds research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The regions they inhabit will be the "future battlegrounds of mammal conservation," said researchers from the UK and the United States.

Over the next few decades, many species now considered safe could "leapfrog" those now deemed at high risk to become even more threatened, the scientists 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," said lead author of the study, Dr. Marcel Cardillo, from the Division of Biology at Imperial College London.

Dr. Cardillo and his team call this kind of risk of extinction "latent risk."

Reindeer are members of the genus Rangifer tarandus that also includes the caribou. The animals are called caribou in North America, and reindeer in Europe and Russia. (Photo courtesy Alberta Reindeer Association)

Using large new geographic, biological, and phylogenetic databases for nearly 4,000 mammal species, the team mapped the global geographic distribution of latent risk to reveal areas where the mammal fauna is still relatively unthreatened but has high inherent sensitivity to disturbance.

Some of the species with the highest latent risk of extinction are the North American reindeer, the musk ox, the Seychelles flying fox, and the brown lemur.

Calling them "hotspots," the research team identified 20 places in the world where mammals are at high latent risk of extinction. These are areas of relatively low human impact inhabited by mammal species that are inherently sensitive to disturbance. In these hotspots, the projected human population growth up to 2015 is high.

The hotspots include large areas such as the Nearctic boreal forests and tundra that are unrepresented in most current conservation prioritization plans, as well as areas of high biodiversity, such as the island arc from Indonesia to the south Pacific.

The researchers identified species with the highest latent risks by comparing their current extinction risk and the risk predicted from their biological traits.

Brown lemurs on display at the Taipei Zoo. Lemurs are one of the prosimian families native to the island nation of Madagascar off the southeast coast of Africa. (Photo courtesy Taipei Zoo)

Latent risk is low in parts of the world already modified by human activity, such as Europe, Japan and New Zealand. Here, human impact has already taken a toll and there are comparatively few surviving species with high latent risk.

Species that inhabit the southwestern Pacific island of New Guinea - divided between the independent nation of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei - are at highest latent risk of extinction, the team found.

Nine of the top 10 latent extinction hotspots are in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. The research team says these are places where conservation dollars can be spent wisely now, before it is too late.

"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," said co-author Professor Andy Purvis, also from Imperial's Division of Biology.

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

Matschie's Tree-kangaroo Dendrolagus matschiei survives only in a small area of northeastern coastal New Guinea. Habitat destruction caused by logging and mineral and oil exploration as well as hunting by local people are decreasing the number of wild tree kangaroos.(Photo courtesy Rainforest Habitat)

1. New Guinea
2. Melanesian islands
3. Indian Ocean islands
4. Andaman and Nicobar islands
5. Sulawesi
6. Borneo
7. Patagonian coast
8. Sumatra and Peninsula Malaysia
9. Western Java
10. Nusa Tenggara

Cardillo said, "We hope conservationists will use our findings to pre-empt future species losses rather than concentrating solely on those species already under threat."