LONDON
\nThe world\u2019s wildlife may be in more trouble than scientists have so far reported, new research published on Thursday suggests.
\nWhile scientists have assessed the status of more than 147,000 plants and animals, there are thousands of species considered too \u201cdata deficient\u201d for a full assessment. As a result, those species haven\u2019t been included in the listing of threatened or endangered species, updated each year by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
\nAmong those under-assessed species are the ocean\u2019s toothy predator, the killer whale, along with the pink fairy armadillo of Argentina and nearly 200 bat species worldwide.
\nBut in some cases, that lack of data itself is a red flag \u2014 suggesting the species may be hard to find because its population has declined, according to a team of international scientists who used data on environmental conditions and human threats to map patterns of extinction threat among assessed species.
\nThe team then looked at the 7,699 underassessed species, and estimated that about 56% were facing conditions that likely put them also at risk of extinction, said the study, published in the journal Communications Biology.
\nThat\u2019s almost double the 28% of global species classified as \u201cthreatened\u201d by the IUCN.
\nThere are millions more plant and animal species that have never been looked at by the IUCN, and scientists estimate about 1 million of them are threatened with extinction, according to a 2019 report by the UN\u2019s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
\nOf the imperiled \u201cdata deficient\u201d plants and animals, many \u201care small-ranged species in remote places,\u201d with many in central Africa, Madagascar and southern Asia, said study author Jan Borgelt, an ecologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
\nThe state of nature \u201ccould be worse than we realise if these predictions are true,\u201d he said.
\nWorst off are likely the underassessed amphibians, with some 85% estimated to be threatened, the study said.
\nSpecies classified by the IUCN as threatened or endangered often become a focus for protection by national governments.
\nStudies such as this \u201chighlight where conservation resources should be allocated,\u201d said Pamela Gonzalez del Pliego, an ecologist at the University of \u00c9vora in Portugal who was not involved in the research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON The world\u2019s wildlife may be in more trouble than scientists have so far reported, new research published on Thursday suggests. While scientists have assessed the status of more than 147,000 plants and animals, there are thousands of species considered too \u201cdata deficient\u201d for a full assessment. As a result, those species haven\u2019t been included […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275878,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-275866","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n