Assessing extinction risk in the absence of species-level data: quantitative criteria for terrestrial ecosystems

Abstract

The conservation of individual plant and animal species has been advanced greatly by the World Conservation Union's (IUCN) development of objective, repeatable, and transparent criteria for assessing extinction risk, which explicitly separate the process of risk assessment from priority-setting. Here we present an analogous procedure for assessing the extinction risk of terrestrial ecosystems, which may complement traditional species-specific risk assessments, or may provide an alternative when only landscape-level data are available. We developed four quantitative risk criteria, derived primarily from remotely sensed spatial data, information on one of which must be available to permit classification. Using a naming system analogous to the present IUCN species-specific system, our four criteria were: (A) reduction of land cover and continuing threat, (B) rapid rate of land cover change, (C) increased fragmentation, and (D) highly restricted geographical distribution. We applied these criteria to five ecosystems covering a range of spatial and temporal scales, regions of the world, and ecosystem types, and found that Indonesian Borneo's lowland tropical forests and the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest were Critically Endangered, while South Africa's grasslands and Brazil's Mato Grosso were Vulnerable. Furthermore, at a finer grain of analysis, one region of Venezuela's coastal dry forests (Margarita Island) qualified as Vulnerable, while another (the Guasare River watershed) was Critically Endangered. In northern

Changes in the ecosystem services provided by forests and their economic valuation: a review

“…The replacement cost method could be applied (for example) to estimate the value of soil protection based on the costs to restore the storage capacity of downstream dams after siltation of the reservoir. For other applications of this method, see Chopra and Kumar ( 2004 ) and Rodríguez et al ( 2007 ). The restoration costs may, for instance, be useful in determining the value of water purifi cation or infi ltration based on the investments made to reverse degradation of the service.…”

Land Cover Change and Conversions

“…Data on land cover are also of use for the implementation of environmental-economic accounting (UN et al 2014a;2014b). Monitoring landscape-scale effects is a useful complement to species-level indicators such as extinction risk because biodiversity loss is so intense that assessing the health of all potentially at-risk species (or species groups) is not feasible (Rodríguez et al 2007). …”

Evolución del riesgo de extinción y estado actual de conservación de las aves de Colombia

“…En la segunda década del siglo XXI se publicaron tres nuevos libros rojos: peces dulceacuícolas (Mojica, et al, 2012), aves (Renjifo, et al, 2014, y peces marinos (Chasqui, et al, 2017), en los cuales se volvió a evaluar el riesgo de las especies de esos grupos taxonómicos. La lógica de evaluación del riesgo de las especies se ha orientado recientemente a la evaluación del riesgo de extinción de ecosistemas (Rodríguez, et al, 2007, Keith, et al, 2013, y Colombia es uno de los primeros países en donde esto se está haciendo (Etter, et al, 2015).…”