into extinction just for fun, we are also exceptionally good at book-keeping. “It is widely suspected that IUCN accounts of species vulnerability are biased toward the better-studied taxonomic groups of the western world,” scientists dryly write in the journal Conservation Biology.
In other words, the West is doing a poor job of saving species, but the rest of the planet likely is, too. Here, the Guardian provides a map of extinct (red) versus critically endangered (yellow) species by regions:
Photo: The Guardian
Now, things are starting to even out a bit. Species at imminent risk of extinction tend to cluster in the tropics—South America, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa—where high biodiversity is often coupled with deforestation and overhunting.
Unfortunately, however, this map still shows only a very biased slice of the pie. Research tends to focus on the big, the cuddly and the beautiful. Plenty of research is done on polar bears and tigers, but how about dung beetles and fungi, mollusks and mites? In addition to the geographic bias, this species bias also skews the data. An editorial piece from the nonprofit B
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