Abstract
Abstract The IUCN Red List (RL) provides high-quality conservation assessments for individual species, yet the rate and scale of environmental deterioration globally challenges the conservation community to develop expedited methods for risk assessment. Here we compare threat assessments for 3,001 species of Neotropical freshwater fishes (NFF) in the IUCN–RL using readily accessible data types as proxies for extinction risk: geographic range, elevation, and species publication date. Furthermore, using geographic and taxonomic data alone, we generated preliminary conservation assessments for 2,334 NFF species currently awaiting IUCN assessment, identifying an additional 671 NFF species as potentially threatened. This number of potentially threatened species represents an increase of 59% over the number of species currently assigned to threat categories by the IUCN–RL. These results substantially expand the number of threatened NFF species from 422 currently on the IUCN RL to 1,093 species as threatened or potentially threatened, representing about 18% of all NFF species. Extinction risk is greater in species with smaller geographic ranges, which inhabit upland rivers, and which were described more recently. We propose the Central and Southern Andes, and Eastern Guiana Shield as priorities in the upcoming IUCN RL assessment of NFF species conservation risk.
Highlights
Continental freshwaters are home to vertebrate species density higher than most other ecosystems on Earth
We evaluated the extinction risks for 3,001 Neotropical freshwater fishes (NFF) species with existing International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) assessments, including 1,068 Characiformes, 1,106 Siluriformes, 302 Cyprinodontiformes, 259 Cichliformes, 146 Gymnotiformes, and 120 species in other taxonomic orders
We identified that about 14% of NFF species are under extinction risk, including 176 as VU, 147 as EN, and 99 as Critically Endangered (CR)
Summary
Continental freshwaters are home to vertebrate species density higher than most other ecosystems on Earth. Almost half of the world’s fish species (about 14,750 of 35,700) are restricted to continental freshwater environments, including rivers, streams, springs, lakes, ponds, swamps, and wetlands, in a habitat volume that comprises less than 0.001% of the Earth’s total water supply. Freshwater ecosystems are increasingly threatened worldwide, especially by the expansion of energy production (Finer, Jenkins, 2012), mining (Ferreira et al, 2014), aquaculture (Valladão et al, 2018), agriculture (Rosa et al, 2020) and urban landscapes (McKinney, 2006). Fishes and amphibians are among the most threatened of all vertebrates, and their species richness and abundances are declining rapidly at regional and continental scales (Reid et al, 2019)
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