WCS 3-Sentence Science

Where Wildlife Go to Die

June 14, 2019

Credit: Forest Dept. and WCS

Each year, Wildlife Conservation Society scientists publish more than 300 peer-reviewed studies and papers. “WCS 3-Sentence Science” is a regular tip-sheet — in bite sized helpings — of some of this published work.

Here we present work by WCS’s James Watson on protected area coverage of species threatened by unsustainable harvesting:

1. Researchers identified global concentrations on land and at sea of 4,543 species threatened by unsustainable commercial harvesting.
2. They found that regions under high-intensity threat (based on accessibility on land and on fishing catch at sea) cover 4.3 percent of the land and 6.1 percent of the seas and contain 82% of all species threatened by unsustainable harvesting and approximately 80 percent of the ranges of Critically Endangered species threatened by unsustainable harvesting.
3. With only 16 percent of these regions are covered by protected areas on land and just 6 percent at sea, urgent actions are needed in these centers of unsustainable harvesting to ensure that use of species is sustainable and to prevent further species’ extinctions.

Study and Journal: “Identifying global centers of unsustainable commercial harvesting of species” from Science Advances
WCS Co-Author(s): James Watson , Director WCS Science and Research Initiative

For more information, contact: Stephen Sautner, 718–220–3682, ssautner@wcs.org.