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It's Looking Bleak For Wild Mammals

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The Washington Post

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 7, 2008

BARCELONA, Spain - A quarter of the world's wild mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to a comprehensive global survey released here Monday.

The new assessment - which took 1,700 experts in 130 countries five years to complete - paints "a bleak picture," leaders of the project wrote in a paper being published in the journal Science. The overview, made public at the quadrennial World Conservation Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature covers all 5,487 wild species identified since 1500. It is the most thorough tally of land and marine mammals since 1996.

"Mammals are definitely declining, and the driving factors are habitat destruction and over-harvesting," said Jan Schipper, the paper's lead author and the IUCN's global mammals assessment coordinator.

Primates face some of the most intense pressures: According to the survey, 79 percent of primates in South and Southeast Asia are facing extinction.

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