PNAS paper titled "Ecological extinction and evolution in the brave new ocean ":

The great mass extinctions of the fossil record were a major creative force that provided entirely new kinds of opportunities for the subsequent explosive evolution and diversification of surviving clades. Today, the synergistic effects of human impacts are laying the groundwork for a comparably great Anthropocene mass extinction in the oceans with unknown ecological and evolutionary consequences. Synergistic effects of habitat destruction, overfishing, introduced species, warming, acidification, toxins, and massive runoff of nutrients are transforming once complex ecosystems like coral reefs and kelp forests into monotonous level bottoms, transforming clear and productive coastal seas into anoxic dead zones, and transforming complex food webs topped by big animals into simplified, microbially dominated ecosystems with boom and bust cycles of toxic dinoflagellate blooms, jellyfish, and disease. Rates of change are increasingly fast and nonlinear with sudden phase shifts to novel alternative community states. We can only guess at the kinds of organisms that will benefit from this mayhem that is radically altering the selective seascape far beyond the consequences of fishing or warming alone. The prospects are especially bleak for animals and plants compared with metabolically flexible microbes and algae. Halting and ultimately reversing these trends will require rapid and fundamental changes in fisheries, agricultural practice, and the emissions of greenhouse gases on a global scale.

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/suppl.1/11458.full or
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/suppl.1/11458.full.pdf+html

WP story on climate change and species extinction titled "Climate Change Brings Risk of More Extinctions " (a possibly related WP story titled "On the Sunny Beaches of Brazil, A Perplexing Inrush of Penguins"):

What has gone missing here is almost as spectacular as the 8,000 acres of swampy wilderness that remain. And that makes it Chesapeake Bay's best place to watch climate change in action.

Visitors can see ospreys gliding overhead, egrets wading in the channels and Delmarva fox squirrels making their unhurried commutes between pine trees.

But then the road turns a corner, and Blackwater's marsh yields to a vast expanse of open water. This is what's missing: There used to be thousands more acres of wetland here, providing crucial habitat for creatures including blue crabs and blue herons. But, thanks in part to rising sea levels, it has drowned and become a large, salty lake. "If people want to see the effects" of Earth's increasing temperature, refuge biologist Roger Stone said, "it's happening here first."

But not just here. Around the world, scientists have found that climate change is altering natural ecosystems, making profound changes in the ways that animals live, migrate, eat and grow. Some species have benefited from the shift. Others have been left disastrously out of sync with their food supply. Two are known to have simply disappeared.

If warming continues as predicted, scientists say, 20 percent or more of the planet's plant and animal species could be at increased risk of extinction. But, as the shrinking habitat at Blackwater shows, the bad news isn't all in the out years: Some changes have already begun. "This is actually something we see from pole to pole, and from sea level to the highest mountains in the world," said Lara Hansen, chief climate change scientist at the World Wildlife Fund, a private research and advocacy group. "It is not something we're going to see in the future. It's something we see right now."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/16/AR2007091600607_pf.html

WP op-ed on how world may be facing 6th major mass extinction event , first for 65 million years since the end of the dinosaurs, and the astroid is us:

More than a decade ago, many scientists claimed that humans were demonstrating a capacity to force a major global catastrophe that would lead to a traumatic shift in climate, an intolerable level of destruction of natural habitats, and an extinction event that could eliminate 30 to 50 percent of all living species by the middle of the 21st century. Now those predictions are coming true. The evidence shows that species loss today is accelerating. We find ourselves uncomfortably privileged to be witnessing a mass extinction event as it's taking place, in real time.

The fossil record reveals some extraordinarily destructive events in the past, when species losses were huge, synchronous and global in scale. Paleontologists recognize at least five of these mass extinction events, the last of which occurred about 65 million years ago and wiped out all those big, charismatic dinosaurs (except their bird descendants) and at least 70 percent of all other species. The primary suspect for this catastrophe is a six-mile-wide asteroid (a mile higher than Mount Everest) whose rear end was still sticking out of the atmosphere as its nose augered into the crust a number of miles off the shore of the present-day Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Earth's atmosphere became a hell furnace, with super-broiler temperatures sufficient not only to kill exposed organisms, but also to incinerate virtually every forest on the planet.

For several million years, a period 100 times greater than the entire known history of Homo sapiens, the planet's destroyed ecosystems underwent a slow, laborious recovery. The earliest colonizers after the catastrophe were populous species that quickly adapted to degraded environments, the ancient analogues of rats, cockroaches and weeds. But many of the original species that occupied these ecosystems were gone and did not come back. They'll never come back. The extinction of a species, whether in an incinerated 65-million-year-old reef or in a bleached modern-day reef of the Caribbean, is forever.

Now we face the possibility of mass extinction event No. 6. No big killer asteroid is in sight. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are not of the scale to cause mass extinction. Yet recent studies show that troubling earlier projections about rampant extinction aren't exaggerated.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/11/AR2008011101994.html

Good TNR essay by Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson subtitled "A scientist's plea for Christian environmentalism ":

Scientists estimate that, if habitat-conversion and other destructive human activities continue at their present rates, half the species of plants and animals on earth could be either gone or at least fated for early extinction by the end of the century. The ongoing extinction rate is calculated in the most conservative estimates to be about 100 times above that prevailing before humans appeared on earth, and it is expected to rise to at least 1,000 times greater (or more) in the next few decades. If this rise continues unabated, the cost to humanity--in wealth, environmental security, and quality of life--will be catastrophic.

Surely we can agree that each species, however inconspicuous and humble it may seem to us at this moment, is a masterpiece of biology and well worth saving. Each species possesses a unique combination of genetic traits that fits it more or less precisely to a particular part of the environment. Prudence alone dictates that we act quickly to prevent the extinction of species and, with it, the pauperization of earth's ecosystems.

...In destroying the biosphere, we are destroying unimaginably vast sources of scientific information and biological wealth. Opportunity costs, which will be better understood by our descendants than by ourselves, will be staggering. Gone forever will be undiscovered medicines, crops, timber, fibers, soil-restoring vegetation, petroleum substitutes, and other products and amenities. Critics of environmentalism forget, if they ever knew, how the rosy periwinkle of Madagascar provided the alkaloids that cure most cases of Hodgkin's disease and acute childhood leukemia; how a substance from an obscure Norwegian fungus made possible the organ transplant industry; how a chemical from the saliva of leeches yielded a solvent that prevents blood clots during and after surgery; and so on through the pharmacopoeia that has stretched from the herbal medicines of Stone Age shamans to the magic-bullet cures of present-day biomedical science.

These are just a few examples of what could be lost if Homo sapiens pursue our current course of environmental destruction. Earth is a laboratory wherein nature--God, if you prefer, pastor--has laid before us the results of countless experiments. We damage her at our own peril.

("Apocalypse Now," by Edward O. Wilson, The New Republic, September 4, 2006 - behind a pay wall, email me to send)

Time Magazine column by E.O. Wilson titled "What About the Rest of Life ?":

Humanity lives not just on the surface of planet Earth. We also, and above all, live in the biosphere. This membranous film of life, teeming with millions of different kinds of organisms, is so thin it cannot be seen edgewise when viewed from a space shuttle. Yet it is our cradle and our only home, blessed with the unique and delicate conditions necessary for human existence. To travel outside the biosphere, even a little bit and for a short period of time, requires the most advanced engineering we can devise, and even then it is always dangerous.

Other species are not just fellow inhabitants of Earth's equitable environment. They create and maintain it far from the physical and chemical state the planet would be in if it were lifeless. Humanity absolutely requires a healthy biosphere for a simple reason: we evolved over millions of years to fit the exact conditions it provides, and no other.

The natural world we are now obliterating with such cheerful abandon cleanses and efficiently distributes our fresh water; it creates and constantly renews our soil; it channels the great cycles of materials and energy; it sustains whatever climatic stability we have not yet perturbed; and it manufactures the very air we breathe. All these services together have been estimated to equal in dollar value the summed Gross Domestic Products of every country in the world combined, and is given to our species free of cost.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1720049_1722077_1722010,00.html

A New Scientist story titled "Earth faces sixth mass extinction ":

The Earth may be on the brink of a sixth mass extinction on a par with the five others that have punctuated its history, suggests the strongest evidence yet.

...The crisis could be foreshadowing a sixth mass extinction, warn the researchers. Life on Earth has already seen five mass extinctions in its four billion year old history. The last one, which wiped out the dinosaurs, happened 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period and was possibly caused by a giant meteor collision.

The current extinction is being precipitated by the widespread loss of habitats because of human activity, according to Tefler. The remaining habitats are small and fragmented, and their quality has been degraded because of pollution.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4797&print=true

Columbia economist and Earth Institute president Jeffrey Sachs column titled "Absent-Minded Killers ":

As a species, human beings have a major self-control problem. We humans are now so aggressively fishing, hunting, logging, and growing crops in all parts of the world that we are literally chasing other species off the planet. Our intense desire to take all that we can from nature leaves precious little for other forms of life.

In 1992, when the world's governments first promised to address man-made global warming, they also vowed to head off the human-induced extinction of other species. The Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed at the Rio Earth Summit, established that "biological diversity is a common concern of humanity." The signatories agreed to conserve biological diversity, by saving species and their habitats, and to use biological resources (e.g., forests) in a sustainable manner. In 2002, the treaty's signatories went further, committing to "a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss" by 2010.

Unfortunately, like so many other international agreements, the Convention on Biological Diversity remains essentially unknown, un-championed, and unfulfilled. That neglect is a human tragedy. For a very low cash outlay - and perhaps none at all on balance - we could conserve nature and thus protect the basis of our own lives and livelihoods. We kill other species not because we must, but because we are too negligent to do otherwise.

Consider a couple of notorious examples. Some rich countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Australia, and New Zealand, have fishing fleets that engage in so-called "bottom trawling." Bottom trawlers drag heavy nets over the ocean bottom, destroying magnificent, unexplored, and endangered marine species in the process. Complex and unique ecologies, most notably underground volcanoes known as seamounts, are ripped to shreds, because bottom trawling is the "low cost" way to catch a few deep sea fish species. One of these species, orange roughy, has been caught commercially for only around a quarter-century, but already is being fished to the point of collapse.

Likewise, in many parts of the world, tropical rainforest is being cleared for pasture land and food crops. The result is massive loss of habitat and destruction of species, yielding a tiny economic benefit at a huge social cost. After cutting down a swath of rainforest, soils are often quickly leached of their nutrients so that they cannot sustain crops or nutritious grasses for livestock. As a result, the new pasture land or farmland is soon abandoned, with no prospect for regeneration of the original forest and its unique ecosystems.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jeffrey_sachs/2007/03/absentminded_killers.html

NYT in-house evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson in a moving post on the tradgedy of species destruction :

For example, fishing in the northwestern Atlantic has caused population collapses in several species of great sharks — including bull sharks, blacktips, dusky sharks, hammerheads. Since 1972, scalloped hammerhead shark populations off the coast of North Carolina have fallen by 98 percent; dusky sharks, bull sharks and smooth hammerhead populations have fallen by 99 percent. By comparison, blacktips are doing well: their population fell by only 93 percent.

The population crashes have had a big knock-on effect. The vanished sharks fed on skates and rays, which have seen their populations grow by a factor of ten. Cownose rays now number 40 million, up from 4 million in 1972. These animals feed on scallops and clams; the increase in their numbers recently caused the collapse of North Carolina's bay scallop fishery. And this isn't even a problem we can blame on climate change.

But to me, whether we need to save other species to save ourselves is not really the point. Each time a species vanishes, the planet becomes a poorer place. It doesn't matter if we've never seen them, if they go extinct without our ever knowing they were here. To live is to participate in the carnival of nature, and the carnival is diminished by the losses.

For there is so much to marvel at. Like the spraying characid — a fish that lays its eggs out of water, jumping to stick them onto leaves that hang down over streams. (The male keeps the eggs wet by splashing them with his tail several times a day.) Or the just-discovered mimic octopus, which can assume the shape, colors and undulating swimming motions of a flat fish like a flounder. When it does so, the octopus even bugs its eyes out, so they look like flounders' eyes.

Or what about the predatory fungi in the soil, which catch tiny worms by means of nooses and sticky webs. (When you get caught by a web of fungus, there is no spider. The web itself digests you.) Or, Philodendron solimoesense, a tropical plant that actively heats its flowers at night, keeping them several degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding air. It does this to encourage scarab beetles — which serve as pollinators — to stay a while. Safe inside the warm flower, the beetles engage in riotous living: feeding and having sex during the night, and resting during the day. Or the Darwin frog: the male guards the tadpoles by keeping them in his throat. Or, or, or.

I wander over to look at a big bird with a fierce beak and a magnificent crest of white feathers. The harpy eagle, says the sign. Endangered.

What a shame.

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/musings-inspired-by-a-quagga/index.html

NYT story on Asia's vanishing forests :

From Indonesia to Malaysia to Myanmar, many of the once plentiful forests of Southeast Asia are already gone, stripped legally or illegally, including in the low-lying lands here in Kalimantan, on the Indonesian side of Borneo. Only about half of Borneo's original forests remain...

Merbau wood, mostly prevalent in Papua's virgin forests, has been illegally logged and shipped to China since the late 1990's, stripping large swathes of forest in the Indonesian province on the western side of the island of New Guinea...

In contrast, the forests in lowland Kalimantan, where roads have been hacked into the land already, are so ravaged by logging that they will have disappeared by 2010, the World Bank says.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/29/world/asia/29indo.html?ex=1303963200&en=d82bf8790194d5af&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

WP story titled "Study Finds Humans' Effect on Oceans Comprehensive ":

Human activities are affecting every square mile of the world's oceans, according to a study by a team of American, British and Canadian researchers who mapped the severity of the effects from pole to pole.

The analysis of 17 global data sets, led by Benjamin S. Halpern of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, Calif., details how humans are reshaping the seas through overfishing, air and water pollution, commercial shipping and other activities. The study, published online yesterday by the journal Science, examines those effects on nearly two dozen marine ecosystems, including coral reefs and continental shelves.

"For the first time we can see where some of the most threatened marine ecosystems are and what might be degrading them," Elizabeth Selig, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a co-author, said in a statement. "This information enables us to tailor strategies and set priorities for ecosystem management. And it shows that while local efforts are important, we also need to be thinking about global solutions."

The team of scientists analyzed factors that included warming ocean temperatures because of greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient runoff and fishing. They found that the areas under the most stress are "the North and Norwegian seas, South and East China seas, Eastern Caribbean, North American eastern seaboard, Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, Bering Sea, and the waters around Sri Lanka."

Some marine ecosystems are under acute pressure, the scientists concluded, including sea mounts, mangrove swamps, sea grass and coral reefs. Almost half of all coral reefs, they wrote, "experience medium high to very high impact" from humans.

Overall, rising ocean temperatures represent the biggest threat to marine ecosystems.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/14/AR2008021401992_pf.html

Column by President of Conservation International and CEO of Agence Francaise de Developpement titled "Conservation With a Human Face ":

On the grounds that the environment in developing countries provides unique ecological services to the whole of mankind, some argue that their populations should not exploit the natural resources on their territories. But this would be ethically wrong, because developed nations have largely destroyed their own primary forests and ecosystems on the path to industrial development, and continue to import large quantities of raw material extracted in developing countries. It would also be ineffective, because developing countries will – legitimately – refuse to assume by themselves the burden of protecting the world's biodiversity to the detriment of their economic growth.

Thus, what is needed is a means to reconcile the task of helping some of the world's poorest people with that of protecting irreplaceable ecosystems. Addressing this two-fold challenge implies expanding the ability of local communities to manage the natural resources on which they depend.

The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), an international initiative launched eight years ago, is based on the principle that local communities themselves are the best trustees of the environment that surrounds them, and that their economic growth will advance their capacity to care for nature. By focusing on "biodiversity hotspots" – regions with unique and highly threatened natural environments – the CEPF relies on the common-sense principle that protecting what nature provides for free is a crucial element of sustainable economic development. The Fund, by delivering financial and technical assistance to people and places that need it the most, has helped create more than nine million hectares of new protected areas – a region larger than Portugal.

Such conservation-based development projects prove that economic growth and environmental protection are not incompatible. On the contrary, mounting environmental challenges in some of the world's economically deprived regions will not be overcome in a context of poverty. Development agencies and environmentalists must thus urgently work toward the convergence of development and conservation priorities. This is the kind of progress the world needs if it is to address effectively one of the most pressing issues of our time: providing a healthy, sustainable planet for rich and poor alike.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/severino6

WP A1 story on Bush vs. the Endangered Species Act ("Since '01, Guarding Species Is Harder"):

With little-noticed procedural and policy moves over several years, Bush administration officials have made it substantially more difficult to designate domestic animals and plants for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Controversies have occasionally flared over Interior Department officials who regularly overruled rank-and-file agency scientists' recommendations to list new species, but internal documents also suggest that pervasive bureaucratic obstacles were erected to limit the number of species protected under one of the nation's best-known environmental laws.

The documents show that personnel were barred from using information in agency files that might support new listings, and that senior officials repeatedly dismissed the views of scientific advisers as President Bush's appointees either rejected putting imperiled plants and animals on the list or sought to remove this federal protection.

Officials also changed the way species are evaluated under the 35-year-old law -- by considering only where they live now, as opposed to where they used to exist -- and put decisions on other species in limbo by blocking citizen petitions that create legal deadlines.

As a result, listings plummeted. During Bush's more than seven years as president, his administration has placed 59 domestic species on the endangered list, almost the exact number that his father listed during each of his four years in office. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has not declared a single native species as threatened or endangered since he was appointed nearly two years ago.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/22/AR2008032202204_pf.html

WP A1 pulitzer winning story on Cheney's chainsaw environmental policies :

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in. First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.

Because of Cheney's intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.

Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.

The Klamath case is one of many in which the vice president took on a decisive role to undercut long-standing environmental regulations for the benefit of business.

By combining unwavering ideological positions -- such as the priority of economic interests over protected fish -- with a deep practical knowledge of the federal bureaucracy, Cheney has made an indelible mark on the administration's approach to everything from air and water quality to the preservation of national parks and forests.

It was Cheney's insistence on easing air pollution controls, not the personal reasons she cited at the time, that led Christine Todd Whitman to resign as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, she said in an interview that provides the most detailed account so far of her departure.

The vice president also pushed to make Nevada's Yucca Mountain the nation's repository for nuclear and radioactive waste, aides said, a victory for the nuclear power industry over those with long-standing safety concerns. And his office was a powerful force behind the White House's decision to rewrite a Clinton-era land-protection measure that put nearly a third of the national forests off limits to logging, mining and most development, former Cheney staff members said.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/leaving_no_tracks/

A short piece in Vanity Fair by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lists the lobbyists who have been named to leadership positions in the US Government (''Texas Chainsaw Management ''):

Spinning the revolving door between government and business as never before, the White House has handed more than 100 top environmental posts to representatives of polluting industries. The author provides a biographical sampler–and describes a devastating rollback of three decades of progress.

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. May 2007

The verdict of history sometimes takes centuries. The verdict on George W. Bush as the nation's environmental steward has already been written in stone. No president has mounted a more sustained and deliberate assault on the nation's environment. No president has acted with more solicitude toward polluting industries. Assaulting the environment across a broad front, the Bush administration has promoted and implemented more than 400 measures that eviscerate 30 years of environmental policy.

...Most insidiously, the president has put representatives of polluting industries or environmental skeptics in charge of virtually all the agencies responsible for protecting America from pollution. Some egregious officials are now gone, often returning to the private sector whose interests they served. But the administrators who remain in place continue to carry the torch—people such as Mark Rey, a timber-industry lobbyist appointed to oversee the U.S. Forest Service; Rejane "Johnnie" Burton, at Interior, a former oil-and-gas-company executive in Wyoming, who has failed to collect billions on leases from oil companies active in the Gulf of Mexico; and Elizabeth Stolpe, a former lobbyist for one of the nation's worst polluters, Koch Industries, who is an associate director (for toxics and environmental protection) at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

This trend is consistent across all of the departments of government that pertain to the environment: the Department of Commerce (which regulates fisheries); the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, and the Interior; the E.P.A.; and even the relevant divisions of the Justice Department. More than 100 representatives from polluting industries occupy key spots at the federal agencies that regulate environmental quality. The revolving door between business and government—turning the regulated into the regulators—has never before spun so fast. And as a consequence environmental protection has been advancing backward on a broad front.

http://www.vanityfair.com /politics/features/2007/05 /revolvingdoor200705?printable =true¤tPage=all

25% of Wild Mammal Species Face Extinction

Global Assessment Paints 'Bleak Picture,' Scientists Say, and Figure of Those at Risk Could Be Higher By Juliet Eilperin Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, October 7, 2008; A13

BARCELONA, Oct. 6 -- At least a quarter of the world's wild mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to a comprehensive global survey released here Monday.

The new assessment -- which took 1,700 experts in 130 countries five years to complete -- paints "a bleak picture," leaders of the project wrote in a paper being published in the journal Science. The overview, made public at the quadrennial World Conservation Congress of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), covers all 5,487 wild species identified since 1500. It is the most thorough tally of land and marine mammals since 1996.

"Mammals are definitely declining, and the driving factors are habitat destruction and over-harvesting," said Jan Schipper, the paper's lead writer and the IUCN's global mammals assessment coordinator. The researchers concluded that 25 percent of the mammal species for which they had sufficient data are threatened with extinction, but Schipper added that the figure could be as high as 36 percent because information on some species is so scarce.

Land and marine mammals face different threats, the scientists said, and large mammals are more vulnerable than small ones. For land species, habitat loss and hunting represent the greatest danger, while marine mammals are more threatened by unintentional killing by pollution, ship strikes and being caught in fishing nets.

While large species such as primates (including the Sumatran orangutan and red colobus monkeys in Africa) and ungulates (hoofed animals such as Africa's Dama gazelle and the Malaysian tapir) may seem more physically imposing, the researchers wrote that these animals are more imperiled than smaller creatures such as rodents and bats because they "tend to have lower population densities, slower life histories, and larger home ranges, and are more likely to be hunted."

Primates face some of the most intense pressures: According to the survey, 79 percent of primates in South and Southeast Asia are facing extinction.

Conservation International President Russell A. Mittermeier, one of the paper's writers and a primate specialist, said animals in the region are being hit with "a triple whammy."

"It's not that surprising, given the high population pressures, the level of habitat destruction, and the fairly extreme hunting of primates for food and medicinal purposes," he said in an interview. He added that some areas in Vietnam and Cambodia are facing "an empty forest syndrome," as even once-populous species such as the crab-eating macaque, or temple monkey, are "actually getting vacuumed out of some areas where it was common."

In some cases, the scientists have a precise sense of how imperiled a species has become: There are 19 Hainan gibbons left in the wild on the island off China's southeast coast, Mittermeier said, which actually counts as progress because there used to be just a dozen.

With others, including the beaked whale and the jaguar, researchers have a much vaguer idea of their numbers despite technological advances -- such as satellite and radio tagging, camera tracking and satellite-based GPS (global positioning system) mapping. The authors of the assessment wrote that most land mammals occupy "areas smaller than the United Kingdom," while "the range of most marine mammals is smaller than one-fifth of the Indian Ocean."

The report on mammals came on the same day that the IUCN updated its "Red List" -- a separate periodic survey of nearly 45,000 species of plants and animals -- and concluded that 32 percent are threatened with extinction. Its scientists added 20 of the world's 161 species of grouper to the list of those at risk of extinction, along with several tarantula species.

Jonathan Baillie, who directs conservation programs at the Zoological Society of London, said: "It's a continual decline in all cases."

Not all of the news was grim yesterday: IUCN officials said that the La Palma giant lizard, believed to be extinct for 500 years, was rediscovered last year in the Canary Islands and is now considered critically endangered.

The writers of the mammals assessment said the observed declines are not inevitable. "At least 5 percent of currently threatened species have stable or increasing populations," they wrote, "which indicates that they are recovering from past threats."

Said Mittermeier: "It comes down to protecting habitats effectively, through protected areas, and preventing hunting and other forms of exploitation." As one example of how conservation can be effective, he noted that in areas where scientific researchers work, animals stand a much better chance of surviving. "Where you have a research presence, it's as good or better than a guard force," he said.

Schipper offered the model of the U.S. effort to bring back the black-footed ferret, which was essentially extinct on the North American prairie as of 1996. "Now it's endangered, which, in this case, is a huge improvement," he said. "When governments and scientists commit resources to a project, many species can be recovered."

Monday's reports come as researchers have been documenting effects of human-generated greenhouse gases. In a paper published Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute found that ocean acidification spurred by carbon emissions will cause sound to travel farther underwater, because increasingly acidic seawater absorbs less low- and mid-frequency sound.

By 2050, the researchers predicted, sounds could travel as much as 70 percent farther in parts of the Atlantic Ocean and other areas, which may improve marine mammals' ability to communicate but also increase background noise, which could prove disorienting.

"We understand the chemistry of the ocean is changing. The biological implications of that we really don't know," said ocean chemist Keith Hester, the lead writer. "The magnitude to which sound absorption will change, based mainly on human contribution, is really astounding."