26865: Craig (news) Researchers Say Protect Endangered Sites (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <sak-pase@bimini.ws>


Researchers Say Protect Endangered Sites
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 12, 2005
Filed at 9:02 p.m. ET

(excerpted -- a link to the full article appears at the end)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- From the Pagham Mountain home of the Afghani brook 
salamander to the Nyanga Mountain lair of the Inyanga toad in Zimbabwe, some 
595 sites around the world have been identified as the sole home of at least 
one endangered species.

Identifying these locations provides a front line list of places that need to 
be protected because, if the site is lost it will spell the doom of the plants 
or animals that make their home only there, said Mike Parr of the American Bird 
Conservancy.

Parr is co-author of a paper discussing these locations and the need to protect 
them. It's being published Monday in the online edition of Proceedings of the 
National Academy of Sciences.

Many endangered species make their homes on isolated islands, where they have 
evolved to differ from the mainland ancestors, Parr said, and many other sites 
are ''mountain islands,'' isolated pockets of forest on mountain areas that 
have not been logged.

"We felt it was important that the human race have a global map of where single 
species sites are," he said in a telephone interview. "It is a list of 
irreplaceable species."

"At least this puts up a marker for sites that, if we loose them, we absolutely 
are going to lose the species," he said.

Several of the 595 sites are home to more than one endangered species, the 
authors noted, with a total of 794 endangered species living at these 
locations.

The researchers estimated that among the five major groups they studied, 245 
extinctions have occurred since the year 1500.

"We therefore risk losing three times as many species as are known to have been 
lost in these same (animal and plant groups) ... over the last 500 years," they 
reported.

Their study focused on five groups -- mammals, birds, amphibians, conifers and 
certain reptiles.

***

Indeed, the paper notes that of the 595 sites 257 are completely unprotected 
and the status of another 48 could not be determined. Some 204 sites are under 
protection and for 86 at least part of the site is protected, the researchers 
said.

But with 508 the sites in developing countries degrees of protection vary and 
money is not always available to monitor the areas.

***

Among the many sites around the world with several endangered species, none has 
more than Haiti's Massif de la Hotte, the only location where one can find some 
13 unusual species of amphibians.

The region is also the source of several of Haiti's major rivers, a source of 
drinking water vital both to humans and amphibians, Parr said.


http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Extinction-Sites.html