The team of researchers, working for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), released a report called Priceless or Worthless? In addition to being online and in print, the report was presented at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in South Korea on Tuesday.

The report (a must read!) lays out the statistics of these rapidly declining plants and animals and explains why it’s important to save them, regardless of how much they help the human race.

“The donor community and conservation movement are leaning increasingly towards a ‘what can nature do for us’ approach, where species and wild habitats are valued and prioritized according to the services they provide for people,” says Jonathan Baillie, Director of Conservation at the Zoological Society of London. “This has made it increasingly difficult for conservationists to protect the most threatened species on the planet… While the utilitarian value of nature is important, conservation goes beyond this. Do these species have a right to survive or do we have a right to drive them to extinction?”

As Baillie implies, humans are at the root of most of these threats. The report describes funding, policy, legal and even marketing standpoints of why we need to and how we can save these species.

And while you can see galleries of these threatened species on National Geographic, New Scientist and Wired, really, go read and look at the report online. The images are phenomenal and the urgency of the risks of extinction leap from the page. (Did we mention it’s a must read?)

From plants and fungi to amphibians and mammals, all life is valuable. A quote from Georgina Mace in the report perhaps explains it best:

Every living species represents one unique pathway to success, developed over millions of years. What we lose with each passing species can never be replaced.

Image: Dr. Richard Bartlett/Wikipedia

Much of the news is alarming. Using data on more than 25,000 species, the current results show that, on average, 50 species of mammals, birds and amphibians move closer to extinction each year due to the impacts of agricultural expansion, logging, over-exploitation, and invasive alien species.

Birds are faring the best, amphibians, the worst. The paper highlights that the percentage of species threatened among vertebrates ranges from 13% of birds to 41% of amphibians. Although the study focused on vertebrates, it also reports on the levels of threat among several other groups assessed for the IUCN Red List, including 14% of seagrasses, 32% of freshwater crayfish, and 33% of reef-building corals.

The study involved some 174 authors from 115 institutions and 38 countries. It was made possible by the voluntary contributions of more than 3,000 scientists under the auspices of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission. One of the authors is the Academy’s own mammalogist Galen Rathbun, who contributed data to the report on the status of the members of the Afrotheria supercohort, an ancient group of African mammals that includes elephants, sea cows, hyraxes, sengis (also known as elephant-shrews), tenrecs, golden moles and aardvarks. Of the 83 species currently recognized in this supercohort, 30 are considered Threatened, and an additional eight species are considered data deficient—these species are quite possibly threatened, but scientists don’t know enough about their distribution to be able to assign them a status.

Now for the good news in the report—conservation programs are working. This is the first study to present clear evidence of the positive impact of conservation efforts around the globe. Results show that the status of biodiversity would have declined by almost 20% if conservation action had not been taken.

The study highlights 64 mammal, bird and amphibian species that have improved in status due to successful conservation action, including three species that were extinct in the wild and have since been re-introduced back to nature– California Condor, the Black-footed Ferret and Przewalski’s Horse. (Last spring, Science in Action produced a video on the Condors’ recent success at Pinnacles National Park.)

Can we learn from this and expand these conservation efforts? An article in Nature concludes this way:

Although the Nagoya negotiations are currently stalling on detailed aspects of conservation funding and access to the resources of ecologically rich nations, [lead author of the study, Michael] Hoffmann remains optimistic. As he concludes from his review of conservation efforts: “We can really turn things around and that’s a powerful message — you should never give up hope.”

Wikipedia image by Bob the Wikipedian, using images from Christian Jansky, J. Patrick Fischer, BS Thurner Hof, Trisha Shears and NOAA