New Red List of Endangered Species

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) released the Red List of Threatened Species 2007. This list reflects the status of conservation of animal and plant species at world-wide scale. The goal of the Red List is to transmit the urgency and the degree of the conservation problem to the public and to politicians, motivating the world-wide community to try and reduce the extinction of the species.

The Red List is already a conventional tool that has demonstrated its power all over the world by alerting about those species that are at risk, or those that come dangerously near. “We congratulate the IUCN for constantly updating this list. It is such a valuable tool that it is being used in almost every environmental report and survey on natural areas. It is even used to determine the level of severity of certain illegal practices that damage threatened species”, emphasizes Aníbal Parera, General Director of Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina.

As the list is an assessment on a world-wide scale, it doesn´t always reflect the severity of biodiversity conservation´s conditions on the national level. A species can be “out of danger” at world-wide level and semi-extinct in one or more countries of the world. In Argentina, for example, “this is the case with the jaguar, the harpy eagle, the Del Plata dolphin, the maned wolf and the anteater, which don’t appear as threatened species at global level, but within Argentina, there not a single doubt that they are in critical state. In fact, they are already extinct in many provinces”, clarified Claudio Bertonatti, Director of Communication and Education of the organization. “Nevertheless, apart from these observations, the new Red List allows the attention that is now given to an enormous diversity of organisms that are in danger at world level”, emphasizes Bertonatti.

At the moment, in the province of Misiones, the heart of the last remaining piece of Paraná Forest, the Administration of National Parks, the Ministry of Ecology of Misiones and Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina, together with many other institutions, are joining their efforts to protect the jaguar. This unique species of the Upper Paraná Atlantic Forest and a symbol of a healthy environment needs urgent actions that rely on the whole community, for it to continue inhabiting these forests.

The Red List of Threatened Species 2007

The Red List of Threatened Species 2007 shows that 40% of the South American species that have been evaluated are threatened. Among these, 400 Argentine species are in different categories of concern at global level, reflecting a variety of situations. For example:

- “Extinct”:  the fox of the Falklands Islands and the D'Orbigny coleopter (Ranthus orbignyi), an aquatic insect unknown to the great majority of the Argentinean people.
- “Extinct in the wild”: three species of snails of the Apipé Streams.
- “Critically endangered”: the Somuncurá frog (Somuncuria somuncurensis), the Parana pine (Araucaria angustifolia), the Brazilian merganser (Mergus octosetaceus), the eskimo curlew (Numenius borealis).
- “Endangered”: the Patagonian cypress (Fitzroya cupressoides), the palo rosa (Aspidosperma polyneuron), the South Andean deer or huemul (Hippocamelus bisulcus), the Andean cat (Oreailurus jacobita), the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) and the yellow cardinal (Gubernatrix cristata).
- “Vulnerable”: the giant armadillo (Priodontes maximus), the Cape shark (Squalus acanthias), the Pampa´s meadowlark (Sturnella defilippii), the lowland tapir (Tapirus terrestris), the bare-throated  bellbird (Procnias nudicollis), the Southern pudu (Pudu puda), the Argentine tortoise (Geochelone chilensis), the Andean flamingo (Phoenicoparrus andinus), the Marsh deer (Blastocerus dichotomus).

For more information on the theatened species listed by the UICN, consult www.iucnredlist.org.