Wednesday 15 May 2019

Even more amphibians are endangered than we thought


MAY 6, 2019
At least a quarter of the world's approximately 8,000 known species of amphibian are recognized as threatened and at risk of extinction. But due to a lack of data on many amphibian species, only about 44 percent of amphibians have up-to-date assessments on their risk of extinction, compared to nearly 100 percent of both birds and mammals. Now, researchers reporting May 6 in the journal Current Biology have used known ecological, geographical, and evolutionary attributes of these data-deficient species to model their extinction risk—and their assessment suggests that at least another 1,000 species are threatened.
"We found that more than 1,000 data-deficient amphibians are threatened with extinction, and nearly 500 are Endangered or Critically Endangered, mainly in South America and Southeast Asia," said Pamela González-del-Pliego of the University of Sheffield and Yale University. "Urgent conservation actions are needed to avert the loss of these species."
The lack of information on these species results from high rates of new species description together with a lag in assessment rates in the last 15 years, she explains. All told, about 2,200 amphibian species had been deemed data deficient. Their extinction risk status simply wasn't known.

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