By Larry Pynn, Vancouver Sun

One-fifth of the world's vertebrate species -- mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fishes -- are threatened and in need of urgent conservation efforts, warns a study Tuesday by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

 

The study reveals that the percentage of threatened vertebrate species ranges from 13 per cent of birds to 41 per cent of amphibians, whose decline is proving especially difficult to arrest.

 

The world's vertebrates -- a diverse group of animals that share the common trait of a backbone -- are threatened by forces such as agricultural expansion, logging, over-exploitation, and invasive non-native species.

 

The study notes that conservation programs can make a difference, identifying 64 species whose status has improved due to successful action, including control of predators, captive breeding, habitat protection, and legislative action.

 

Three animals that were extinct in the wild and have since been re-introduced to nature are the California condor, black-footed ferret, released last year in Saskatchewan, and Przewalski's Horse in Mongolia.

 

The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 set a target of halting the decline in global biodiversity by 2010.

 

"We have not met that target," Simon Fraser University's Nick Dulvy, co-chair of IUCN's shark specialist group, said in an interview.

 

"It's not a failure of conservation, it's a lack of money and political will to implement the scale of conservation required."

 

Dulvy noted that fewer than one-quarter of the world's 1,044 sharks, rays, and skates assessed to date are considered safe and that future generations may only know them in photographs unless the planet acts.

 

About half of the total lack adequate scientific information to determine their conservation status, raising fears that some species could be wiped out without society's knowledge.

 

The Switzerland-based IUCN calls on nations around the world for a "very significant increase in resources," arguing that the "current level of conservation action is outweighed by the magnitude of threat."

 

Among the Canadian species on the list are the critically endangered Vancouver Island marmot, Eskimo curlew (an Arctic shorebird), and the shortnose cisco (a Great Lakes fish). The whooping crane, which nests in Wood Buffalo National Park, on the Alberta-Northwest Territory border, is considered endangered.

 

Southeast Asia has experienced the most dramatic recent losses, largely driven by the planting of export crops like oil palm, commercial hardwood timber operations, agricultural conversion to rice paddies, and unsustainable hunting.

 

IUCN produces a red list of species at risk, ranging, in order of severity, from least concern to near threatened, vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered, extinct in the wild, and extinct.

 

The study, to be published in the international journal Science, coincides with the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan.

 

It is described as the most comprehensive assessment of the world's vertebrates, involving some 174 authors from 115 institutions and 38 countries, and made possible by the contributions of more than 3,000 scientists.

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