Study finds that 56% of wildlife species could become extinct

A new study published Thursday suggests that the world’s wildlife may be in more trouble than scientists have reported so far.

Although scientists have evaluated the condition of more than 147,000 plants and animals, there are thousands of species that are considered “data deficient” for a full assessment. As a result, this species is not included in the list of threatened or endangered species, which is updated annually by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Among the species that have not really been appreciated is the Orca, an ocean predator known as the killer whale, along with the lesser pichiciego, a species of armadillo that lives in Argentina, as well as the nearly 200 species of bats across the planet.

But in some cases, the lack of data is itself a warning sign, indicating that species may be hard to find due to the decline in their numbers, according to a team of international scientists who used data on environmental conditions and threats. Human resources for mapping extinction risk patterns among assessed species.

The team then evaluated 7,699 underestimated species, and estimated that about 56% of them face conditions that potentially put them at risk of extinction, says the study, which was published in the journal Communications Biology.

This is nearly double 28% of the global species classified as “threatened” by the IUCN.