Half of Earth's Wildlife Lost Since 1970, Report Finds

[Buster's Uncle]

Half of Earth's Wildlife Lost Since 1970, Report Finds
LiveScience.com
by Megan Gannon, News Editor  10 hours ago



An African Lioness takes a swipe at remote camera in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.



Wildlife populations have been cut in half over the past four decades, a new report shows.

The number of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish on Earth dropped by 52 percent from 1970 to 2010, according to the World Wildlife Fund's newly released Living Planet Report.

The findings are based on the Living Planet Index, which is a database maintained by the Zoological Society of London to track more than 10,000 representative populations of vertebrates (animals with a backbone). [Image Gallery: Bringing Extinct Animals Back to Life]

According to that index, 39 percent of wildlife on land, 39 percent of wildlife in the ocean and 76 percent of freshwater wildlife have disappeared over the last 40 years.

Animals in the tropics were hit hardest. The report found a 56 percent decline in 3,811 populations of 1,638 species in the tropics from 1970 to 2010. In contrast, the 6,569 populations of 1,606 species in temperate regions declined by 36 percent over the same 40-year period.

The main threats to wildlife across the world are habitat loss and exploitation (through hunting and fishing) — and sometimes a combination of both. The WWF report points to the example of the forest elephant (Loxodonta africana cyclotis) in West and Central Africa. Because of habitat loss, forest elephants had been confined to an area that accounted for just 6 to 7 percent of their historic range by 1984. Later, the elephant population size shrank by more than 60 percent between 2002 and 2011, mostly due to poaching for ivory, the report found.

Humans are consuming more resources — such as trees, food and fossil fuels — than the planet can sustainably accommodate, essentially exhausting the ecological goods of one-and-a-half Earths, according to the report.

People in high-income countries have much greater ecological footprints than people in low-income countries, the report found. But high-income countries aren't suffering the biggest losses to their ecosystems; these nations actually saw a 10 percent increase in biodiversity, according to the WWF. Meanwhile, middle-income countries show 18 percent species declines, and low-income countries show 58 percent declines. From 1970 to 2010, species populations fell by 83 percent in Latin America, the region with the worst biodiversity declines.

"We're gradually destroying our planet's ability to support our way of life," Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF, said in a statement. "But we already have the knowledge and tools to avoid the worst predictions. We all live on a finite planet and it's time we started acting within those limits."

The BBC reported that some critics were skeptical of the results and think the dataset may be inherently biased, slightly exaggerating the nature of the problem.

"Those [species] in decline are perhaps of greater interest, and hence more likely to be monitored, than those that are stable or increasing," Stephen Buckland, of the National Centre for Statistical Ecology in the United Kingdom, told BBC News. "For practical reasons, populations that are more impacted by man are more easily monitored. ... So is there a decline? Certainly. Are animal numbers around 52 percent lower than 40 years ago? Probably not."


http://news.yahoo.com/half-earths-wildlife-lost-since-1970-report-finds-163823535.html

[Buster's Uncle]

The World Has Lost Half of Its Wildlife Since 1970, and We’re the Reason
Takepart.com
By David Kirby | September 30, 2014 3:32 PM



The world’s population of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish has plummeted 53 percent since 1970, according to a World Wildlife Fund report released on Tuesday.

“Population sizes of vertebrate species have halved over the last 40 years,” the report said. “The state of the world’s biodiversity appears worse than ever.” During the same time, the world's human population has doubled, it noted.

The study used a Living Planet Index to measure more than 10,000 populations of the world’s vertebrates.

“These are the living forms that constitute the fabric of the ecosystems which sustain life on Earth,” Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International, wrote in the report’s introduction. “We ignore their decline at our peril.”

The decline was most pronounced in the tropics, where the number of species fell from 3,811 to 1,638—a 56 percent drop. Latin America was hit hardest, with an 83 percent crash in species population.

Habitat loss and degradation, hunting, and fishing are the primary causes for the population crash in Latin America, the study stated. Climate change is the next biggest threat, according to the report.

Land and marine species have declined 39 percent each since 1970, with the steepest fall seen in sea turtles, shark species, and large migratory bird in the tropics and the Southern Ocean.

Three-quarters of freshwater aquatic life have disappeared over the past 44 years. “The main threats to freshwater species are habitat loss and fragmentation, pollution and invasive species,” the report stated.

This year’s WWF Living Planet Report found a steep and unprecedented drop in species, compared with the 28 percent decline the organization reported in a 2012 study.

One reason for the dramatic dip: new methodology deployed by the researchers.

“Year by year we have more data coming in, and it's responsible to include that data,” said Keya Chatterjee, WWF’s director of renewable energy outreach. “In previous reports, each species was given equal weight. Now a level of weighting that is proportional to the size of each taxonomic group—birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fishes—and realm is given.”

While the report highlighted species decline, it also measured a growing human ecological footprint, described as the consumption of goods and the emission of greenhouse gases.

“More than 60 percent of the essential ‘services’ provided by nature, from our forests to our seas, are in decline,” the report stated.

That’s left the planet with a shrinking capacity to sustain its growing population.

WWF offered recommendations for alleviating the problem, such as shifting to more sustainable food and energy production.

Individuals can make a difference, Chatterjee said, by installing solar energy, reducing food waste, and switching to electric cars and other low-carbon vehicles.


http://news.yahoo.com/world-lost-half-wildlife-since-1970-reason-193207489.html