30 March, 2006 Latent Extinction Risk for Conservation Planning

A recent study has identified 20 ne w hotspots for biodiversity protection using the concept of “latent extinction risk”. Incorporating latent extinction risk patterns into conservation planning could help to anticipate biodiversity losses before they begin, by implementing preventive measures. During the last decades, losses of biodiversity worldwide have accelerated dramatically. As biodiversity loss has been recognized to be a global-scale problem, conservation programmes are increasingly framed on a global scale. Biodiversity conservation planning has to optimise the allocation of the limited funding resources by prioritising areas for protection. Usually, this process considers the species’ richness, the number of threatened or endemic species, and the degree of habitat loss to define the hotspots. A new study proposes a more proactive approach by using the concept of “latent extinction risk”, which allows to identify areas where disturbance may be low at present but have important potential for future loss of species. This parameter is calculated by subtracting the current extinction of a species (taken from the World Conservation Union Red List) from the extinction risk predicted by its biology. The authors used large new databases of the biology and evolution of nearly 4,000 mammal species to construct predictive models of species’ level of latent extinction risk. The aim of the project was to define the global geographical distribution of latent risk for non-marine mammals where species were still unthreatened, but with a high inherent sensitivity to disturbance. The results show that latent risk is especially low in areas that have been already perturbed by human activity, such as Europe, western Russia, Japan, Madagascar, and New Zealand. In these regions, the human impact has resulted in the survival of very few species with high latent risk. Areas with high latent risk were found in the northern regions of North America and the arc of islands between the Bay of Bengal and the southwest Pacific. Twenty hotspots were identified using this method, which include boreal forests and tundra areas near the Arctic regions. The authors have assessed the discrepancy between the hotspots identified by this method and the ones identified on the basis of number of endemic species and number of threatened species. They found that the overlap of latent risk hotspots and the areas identified by the current methods was very low, which means that they would be poorly represented under current conservation prioritisation schemes. Furthermore, many of the latent risk hotsopts are expected to undergo a rapid increase in the human population density, which is an indicator of threats to biodiversity, as a result of the current inadequate levels of protection. The authors concluded that using the “latent extinction risk” concept to identify priority areas for conservation could be the best way to anticipate species losses before they actually happen, thus allowing to implement preventing conservation measures. Incorporating latent risk patterns in the global conservation planning could be the most cost-effective measure to protect biodiversity in the long-term. Moreover, this method could be used to monitor the state of wild nature for the United Nations´ Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which has been ratified by the EU member countries. Source: Cardillo M. et al (2006) "Latent extinction risk and the future battlegrounds of mammal conservation", PNAS, 103(11):5157-4161. Contact: [email protected] Theme(s): Biodiversity, Sustainable development and policy assessment

Additional Information : An example of conservation actions concerning hot spots in the boreal forest zone is given by the Finnish project (LIFE03NAT/FI/000034). Co-funded by the EU LIFE programme, this project aims to conserve such hot spots, including such rare and precious habitats like boreal natural forests, esker forests and bog woodlands. No less than one third of the threatened bird species found in Finland use these forests for breeding or during migration. It is the largest forest restoration project in Finland, working on 33 Natura 2000 sites in southern and western Finland to improve their favourable conservation status. For more information see the project summary and the project web site . Opinions expressed in this News Alert do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission

1 European Commission DG ENV News Alert issue 16

March, 2006