Many more amphibian species at risk of extinction than previously thought
https://news.yale.edu/2019/05/06/many-more-amphibian-species-risk-extinction-previously-thought
Many more amphibian species at risk of extinction than previously thought
By Kendall Teare | May 6, 2019
Frogs already knew it wasnt easy being green, but the going just got a lot tougher for the 1,012 additional species of amphibians who have now been newly identified as at risk of extinction in a Yale-led study.
This paper is published in Current Biology.
Amphibians are highly threatened and are declining worldwide at an unprecedented rate, said lead author Pamela González-del-Pliego, postdoctoral ecologist at Yale. Unfortunately, it seems that the percentage of threatened amphibians is much higher than we previously knew.
Until this study, less than two-thirds of all amphibian species had been assessed for extinction risk by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) the body that assigns conservation status to species on a scale from Least Concern to Extinct. This new study by a team of researchers from the United States and United Kingdom provides extinction risk predictions for an additional 25% of the worlds amphibian species, or close to 2,200 species, which had not previously been assessed by the IUCN due to a lack of data.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.04.005