Environmental pressures caused by humans are expected to intensify worldwide throughout the 21st century. An international team of researchers, including scientists from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Beersheba, has predicted that reptiles could overtake amphibians as the highest priority for conservation among vertebrates as threats like climate change and invasive species worsen in the future.
Reptiles include a wide variety of cold-blooded, air-breathing vertebrates, including snakes, lizards, turtles, iguanas, crocodiles, and alligators, that breathe through lungs, or lay eggs, and have skin covered with scales or bony plates.
To address this gap, researchers developed the Proactive Conservation Index (PCI), which can evaluate species’ conservation priority, factoring in different future threats, such as climate change, land-use change, and invasive species. The index also accounts for species traits that can affect their vulnerability to extinction, including body size, reproductive rate, and geographical range.
Working with experts from the Université Paris-Saclay in France, associate professor Uri Roll of the Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology in Sde-Boker warned that habitat loss and the overexploitation of nature are driving wildlife populations toward extinction at an unprecedented rate.
Other university collaborators
Also involved in the research were experts from the Plant and Environmental Sciences Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Tel Aviv University’s School of Zoology, and colleagues from the University of Arizona, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Oxford, and the School of Biosciences at the University of Melbourne.
“Many threats are expected to worsen during this century, but most existing tools for assessing species’ extinction risk consider past population declines rather than how these threats will change in the future,” the researchers wrote.
“I’m deeply passionate about nature. I feel that we have a moral obligation to conserve it – to minimize our footprint and correct mistakes we’ve made in the past and that science has a lot to contribute toward this end – but that we also have to leave our ivory towers and ensure that our knowledge and insights will make a difference in the real world,” Roll declared.
ONE MIGHT react to the danger to reptiles with apathy by asking, “Who cares if there are fewer snakes and the like?” But Roll gets piqued by that question.
“I teach a course called Conservation Biology: Philosophy and Ethics. There are two main schools of thought about protecting nature: to do so for its own sake or for our benefit. In view of human history and culture, we don’t need to justify the first view,” he told The Jerusalem Post.
“Living things have a right to life and to flourish irrespective of their value to us, even in the cynical world we live in. Money is not the only value. Nature is interconnected with us and holds the system together. We benefit from walking in nature; it makes us less violent.”
While there is a food chain of higher animals eating lower ones, the presence of all types of animals is vital for our well-being, and they are greatly endangered, he continued. Amphibians – like toads, newts, frogs, and salamanders that are born with gills for breathing underwater where they hatch and spend their early life – are as important as reptiles, and the smaller ones are also in danger.
Many bird species are also being decimated by the invasion of their habitats by species like mynas and parakeets, which don’t belong here but were introduced as pets that escaped from their homes.
Roll, who now lives in the South, was born in Haifa and grew up on the Carmel, where he spent many hours developing a passion for nature.
“I decided to devote my life to it. Today, instead of visiting nature spots, kids are indoors with their smartphones. They should be encouraged by their parents and teachers to spend an hour every day in nature. Zoos are nice, but they’re not enough.
“Israel is covering itself with more and more concrete, and this is harmful to nature and to our psyches. A few years ago, a Swiss insurance company ranked countries on how safe they would be in the future; Israel was listed as one of the worst because, despite tree planting, it is endangering its natural environment and becoming more crowded.”
THE RESEARCH team used the PCI to estimate the conservation priority of all land vertebrates globally, totaling 33,560 species. They compared the species’ PCI rankings with their classification in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, which is a widely used framework for assessing extinction risk.
The IUCN Red List has been instrumental in guiding scientific research and conservation actions. As of November 2024, 166,061 species have been assigned a threat category by the IUCN Red List, which, with the PCI, revealed similar results for several species.
The researchers calculated the PCI for 10,892 reptile, 5,658 mammal, 10,078 bird, and 6,932 amphibian species for two future years (2050 and 2100).
The PCI complements existing conservation assessment tools, offering different insights into species’ conservation priority, the authors say. Its advantages include the ability to evaluate understudied species and incorporate different future scenarios. The tool could help conservation managers more efficiently allocate limited resources and facilitate proactive, rather than reactive, conservation strategies.
The authors added that “our new future-focused method reveals many species and regions that will soon need more conservation attention than those currently suggested by methods that are focused on current and past threats. Our method especially highlights reptile species, arid regions, tropical islands, and tropical montane forests as necessitating further focus. Acting before future threats are fully realized may give us the head start we need to protect this valuable biodiversity.”
They produced a user-friendly web application to display their results to enable users to calculate PCI scores for any taxon (a unit used in the science of biological classification), taxonomy, and region, customizing the index according to the severity of predicted threats and importance of species attributes in other systems. The unique index can help practitioners prioritize fine-scale species conservation actions in light of future threats and different global change scenarios, they explained.
Changes in climate, land, and sea use, the exploitation of animals, and the expansion of invasive species are causing population and species extinctions at an unprecedented rate.
“These processes are expected to intensify during this century – 41% of land vertebrates are expected to have most of their ranges subject to unprecedented climate extremes by 2100, and land-use change will cause land vertebrates to lose up to 11% of their current range every decade. Such threats to biodiversity are driven by the expanding human population, which is projected to undergo a net increase of 30% by 2100, along with an increase in per capita resource consumption.”