A new study, published today, Thursday, warns that the world’s wildlife may face a greater danger than scientists know so far.
Scientists have assessed the status of more than 147,000 plants and animals, but there are thousands of species that are described as “data deficient” to allow a full assessment.
As a result, these species are not included in the list of threatened or endangered species, which is updated every year by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Among the species whose status has not been adequately assessed, are a type of prominent toothed killer whale in the ocean along with the armadillo in Argentina and nearly 200 species of bats worldwide.
But in some cases, the lack of data is a sign of danger, meaning that they are so hard to find, according to the team of international scientists who used data on environmental conditions and human threats to map extinction patterns among assessed species.
The study, which was published in the journal Communications Biology, indicated that scientists then searched 7,699 species that did not adequately assess their status, and estimated that about 56 percent of them face conditions that are likely to make them also at risk of extinction.
This is about twice the 28 percent estimated by the International Union for Conservation of Nature for “threatened” species.
There are millions of other plant and animal species that have not been studied by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and scientists estimate that about one million are threatened with extinction, according to a 2019 report from the United Nations’ Science and Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
Many of the “data missing” plants and animals are “small-sized species that live in remote areas”, much of which are in central Africa, Madagascar and southern Asia, said Jan Burgelt, an ecologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who led the study.
He added that the state of nature “could be worse than we know if these predictions are correct.”
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