London-Sana
A new study published today has found that the world's wildlife may be at greater risk than scientists yet know.
"Scientists have assessed the status of more than 147,000 plants and animals, but there are thousands of species that are described as deficient in data to allow for a full assessment," Reuters quoted Jan Borgelt, an ecologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who led the study.
Yan explained that many plants and animals that are missing data are small species that live in remote areas, a large part of which are in central Africa, Madagascar and southern Asia.
"The state of nature could be worse than we know if those predictions were true," he added.
According to the team of international scientists who used environmental and human threat data to map extinction patterns among the assessed species, the lack of data is a sign of danger, meaning that their small numbers are the reason they are so hard to find.
Among the species whose status has not been adequately assessed are a species of prominent toothed killer whale in the ocean as well as the armadillo in Argentina and nearly two hundred species of bats worldwide.
The study indicated that scientists then looked at 7,699 species whose status has not been adequately assessed, and estimated that about 56 percent of them face conditions that are likely to make them also at risk of extinction.
This is nearly double the 28 percent estimated by the International Union for Conservation of Nature for threatened species.
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