Rethinking Extinctions
Threatened and Recently-extinct Vertebrates of the World is an ambitious new book by Canadian author Matthew Richardson.
In his soon to be released book, Matthew Richardson provides a comprehensive overview of all threatened and recently-extinct mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes within the context of the places where they lived.
While Matthew will no doubt continue to be involved with the project for many years to come, the upcoming publication of his new book seemed like a good time to look back on how it all came about, his reasons for writing the book in the first place, and what he hopes to accomplish by doing so.
Matthew Richardson Reflects on the book...
To tackle this project, I first had to work out an up-to-date biogeographical arrangement with which to frame these animals. The system that I ultimately came up with broadly divides the world into a series of realms and regions, both terrestrial and marine, with particular emphasis upon geographic features such as mountains, lake, islands, and the like.
All of this information can, of course, be more or less be found elsewhere. There is no shortage of sources on the subject, not least of which being the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, upon which I have mainly relied. It is this very wealth of data, however, that often makes it so difficult for layman and expert alike to see the “big picture” in conservation. My goal has simply been to provide that picture, in the hope that it will reveal numbers and patterns useful in conservation on a smaller scale. I myself learned a great deal from writing it.
Lessons Learned
I learned a great deal from writing the book. First and foremost, I discovered that the IUCN Red List is in need of reform. The entire committee-driven process of evaluating threat level for each species and subspecies is terribly slow and unwieldly, and indeed generally unable to keep up with the speed of new discoveries and events. Very often, even those forms fortunate enough to have been assessed within recent memory are yet given short-shrift.
I am constantly astonished, for instance, by what some assessors consider to be “Least Concern.” A case in point is the Kajang slender litter frog (Leptolax kajangensis), a species known with certainty only from a single small cave atop a mountain on a tiny island off the coast of Malaysia, yet still considered not to be threatened under current guidelines. A more serious and pervasive criticism is what I call the “Data Deficient garbage can,” which indeed accounts for the vast majority of creatures on the Red List. Species and subspecies deemed to be “Data Deficient” are often, in fact, quite clearly threatened and often already extinct, yet are nevertheless left to linger without update in seeming perpetuity. So it is that, for my part, I tend to err on the side of caution.
If a particular species is known only from a single specimen collected a hundred years ago from a now-disappeared patch of forest on a tiny island, that species, at least in my book, isn’t “Data Deficient”: it’s almost certainly extinct.
Another lesson that I’ve learned is that the real key to wildlife conservation lies in protecting areas of strategic importance, such as tropical forests. This, I’m sure, will not come as a surprise to anyone. Yet it is remarkable how little regard is given to, say, the quickly disappearing freshwater fishes and their habitats of the Middle East, or to the spectacular array of amphibians endemic to the various isolated mountains of Central and South America, where the majority of extinctions are occurring today. Indeed, species are being lost in such places all the time, often without anyone even noting their passing.
It says much about humanity that so many thousands of species and subspecies lack even so much as a common name, and are usually not deemed important enough to photograph for the benefit of posterity. So it is that I have tried to highlight such creatures and the places where they live, alongside the better-known stories of giant pandas and rhinos. By my estimation, at least 500 vertebrate species and subspecies have been driven extinct by modern humans, while another 14,000 are currently considered to be threatened with the same fate.
If nothing else, the book will at least serve as a useful benchmark for future researchers. But my hope is that, in another fifty years or so, there will no longer be any need for such research, or for books of this sort.
Our Vanishing Vertebrates . . .
read our interview with the author
Saving Nature sat down with Matthew Richardson to to discuss the project and share insights into his motivation for writing the book.