Protected Habitats Are Falling Short Of Saving Endangered Animals
Endangered species within protected habitats in tropical forests are still facing threats from beyond their sanctuaries.
Tropical forests contain most of Earth’s biodiversity, but many of these regions are under pressure as the land is being developed for industrial and agricultural purposes.
Governments and international groups all over the world are working to establish more protected wildlife areas to slow the loss of endangered species, but new evidence indicates that the strategy is not enough to stop the decline.
A team of researchers assessed how mammalian communities in tropical environments are affected by threats outside the borders of protected areas.
“We found that tropical forests near more people have fewer mammal species. It suggests that some species do not survive even when forests are protected, such as in national parks,” said Lydia Beaudrot, one of the study authors and an assistant professor at Michigan State University.
The research team collected data from almost 560,000 camera-trap images of 239 mammal species in tropical forests across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The images came from a network of 17 established sites across the tropics.
They measured the abundance and distribution of the mammalian community in each area. Then, they tested how those metrics responded to nearby human activity.
The number of mammal species in a region was greatly influenced by human population density. Even when the wildlife was restricted to a protected area and the human population was kept outside, the study predicted a decline of one percent in the abundance of species for every 16 people per square kilometer in the surrounding area.
Forest loss and fragmentation also had a negative impact on mammal communities within about 31 miles of their forest homes.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
Overall, the results of the study show just how much human activity contributes to the loss of biodiversity.
Protected habitats are important for conservation, but they are not enough to guarantee the survival of endangered species.
These efforts should be complemented with other measures like preventing forest loss and reducing the effects of humans outside protected areas.
Additionally, restoring habitats across the landscape can help expand the space between humans and tropical mammals, which will boost biodiversity.
The endangered species may also stand a better chance at survival if protected habitats become more connected rather than isolated.
“Our results suggest the existence of anthropogenic extinction filtering acting on mammals in tropical forests, whereby human overpopulation has driven the most sensitive species to local extinction while remaining ones are able to persist, or even thrive, in highly populated landscapes and mainly depend on habitat cover,” said Ilaria Greco, the lead author of the study from the University of Florence, Italy.
The findings were published in the journal PLOS Biology.
More About:News
Read This Next
