How Conservation Is Helping Ungulates
“Ungulates” include a very broad range of animals such as horses, cows, pigs, rhinoceroses, giraffes, camels, deer, and hippopotamuses. It is an especially diverse group when it comes to conservation actions and outcomes, and advocacy for the world’s ungulates can take many forms. Nonetheless, understanding the difference that conservation is making can be difficult because, as researchers note, “conservationists are generally preoccupied with reacting to emergencies rather than with quantifying their actions and impacts and it is inherently difficult to know what would have happened without intervention.” Scientists have used various techniques to try to quantify the effectiveness of conservation, from constructing counterfactual and hypothetical scenarios, to different types of computer modeling and much more.
In this study, researchers used ungulates as a case study in an attempt to understand if and how conservation makes an impact. Specifically, they “investigated how conservation efforts affected extinction risk” by looking at the data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List categories between 1996 and 2008, and comparing those with a scenario of what might have happened if all action had ceased at the beginning of that period. Then they “used the IUCN Red List Index (RLI), an established method that tracks trends over time in overall extinction risk of species, to compare the observed RLI with that resulting from our hypothetical scenario.”
As one might expect, the authors note there are individual differences in how various species benefit from conservation efforts. To address this, they “classified all ungulates according to a typology that related the specificity of actions to the specificity of the threat,” and they looked at “all 235 ungulates assessed on the IUCN Red List … in the orders Cetartiodactyla (Cervidae, Moschidae, Tragulidae, Giraffidae, Camelidae, Antilocapridae, Suidae, Tayassuidae, Hippopotamidae, Bovidae) and Perissodactyla (Rhinocerotidae, Equidae, Tapiridae).” They found, according to the RLI, that the overall status of ungulates deteriorated from 1996 to 2008, as “index values declined by 2.5% (average 0.2%/year),” which exceeds the background rate of decline for all mammals, which was 0.8% from 1996 to 2008.
These declines are a concern, of course, but in a scenario where no conservation action was taken, the researchers identify “112 ungulate species that we estimated would have deteriorated in conservation status by one or more IUCN Red List categories over the analyzed period (compared with 25 that actually did).” In yet another scenario (“no conservation action including conservation on private lands”), the researchers estimated that 122 species would have deteriorated, and that “the counterfactual RLI would have declined by 24% between 1996 and 2008 (or 2%/year) and varied between 7.5% and 81.3%, respectively, for the most optimistic and alarmist assessments.” Overall, their best estimate suggested that “the overall decline in the conservation status of ungulates would have been nearly 8 times worse than observed.”
This study provides a good overview of the situation for ungulates throughout the world. It also describes an interesting way of approaching the measure of conservation effectiveness by estimating what would have happened if we did nothing. In particular, they found that conservation actions prevented the “rapid demise and probable extinction” of at least two species, the Javan rhinoceros and greater one-horned rhinoceros. Interestingly, the authors say if they extrapolated the results to all mammals, they believe that the RLI would have declined by an additional 18% if no action had been taken. While it may be discouraging to hear that animal populations are declining despite conservation action, these results show that the situation would be dire for some animals — for others it would be game over. The results should not discourage us from acting, but should inspire us to redouble our efforts and reverse the loss of species, not just slow it down.