Species decline a ‘drastic alert’

ALMOST half of the animal species on the world’s surface are currently undergoing declines in their population sizes, new research has found.

The paper, published yesterday, examines changes in population densities of more than 70,000 species of animals from across the world’s surface over time, making it the most comprehensive research of its kind to date.

The researchers from Queen’s University Belfast said the findings are a “drastic alert” as global biodiversity loss caused by human industrialisation is significantly more alarming than previously thought.

They found that 48% of species on Earth are undergoing declines in their population sizes, whereas less than 3% of them are increasing in population size. The extent of species going extinct has traditionally been measured by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s threat conservation categories, which found that 28% of life on Earth is threatened with extinction.

However, the new research used a global-scale analysis of a different measure of extinction risk, which was “population trends”.

The researchers found the magnitude of the extinction crisis is considerably more severe than shown by the traditional measure based on threat categories.

Dr Daniel Pincheira-Donoso, senior lecturer in evolutionary biology and macroecology at Queen’s University Belfast, said: “Our work is a drastic alert about the current magnitude of this crisis that has already devastating impacts on the stability of nature as a whole, and on human health and well-being.”