Barrow, Edmund G.

Comer, Patrick

Keith, David A.

Oliveira-Miranda, María A.

Rodríguez, Jon Paul

Rodríguez-Clark, Kathryn M.

RERO DOC Digital Library

The trade in pet lorises has been cited as a key threat totheir decline. The species noted as hardest hit is the Javanslow lorisN. javanicus, which was included on ConservationInternational’s biennial list of the World’s 25 MostEndangered Primates in both 2008 and 2010. Long-termdata on loris trade, rescue and rehabilitation from Java,Indonesia, reveal the impact. Cutting of teeth by traders,inability of reintroduced animals to survive in the wild, andlack of enforcement of animal protection laws were clariﬁedas key threats, and are representative of the region ingeneral.In 2009 the threat of the pet trade to slow lorises washighlighted at a global level when a YouTube video of a petpygmy slow loris being tickled went viral, achieving nearly15 million hits by 2012. Pet slow lorises on YouTube werenothing new: before 2009 a survey of YouTube and FlipClipfound 75 videos of loris pets. The worrying aspect of thetickling video was the immediate reaction of the thousandsof commenters, one in 10 of whom indicated they would likea loris as a pet.For 3 years various animal rights groups petitionedYouTube to remove the video, which shows a highlyoverweight loris in a brightly lit room on a bed with nosubstrates to grasp, tagging it as animal abuse. The videoremained and YouTube refused to comment. Although theowners of the animal in the video claimed that in Russia itis legal to own lorises as pets, other groups pointed out thatonly 12 pygmy lorises had ever been legally imported intoRussia, and these had been for scientiﬁc or zoo-breedingpurposes, thus questioning the legality of Russian breedingfacilities for lorises. The zoo community pointed to the lowreproductive rate in captivity, and the small worldwidecaptive population, all indicating an illegal origin for most ofthe loris pets seen in videos.On 25 January 2012 the UK-based BBC Natural HistoryUnit aired a programme in its Natural World series entitledThe Jungle Gremlins of Java. Although principally a ﬁlmabout the ecology of the Javan slow loris the ﬁlm highlightedthe tickling video, and showed nearly 10 minutes of footageof animal markets in Indonesia oﬀering for illegal sale morethan 30 slow lorises of three species, but mainly Javan slowlorises. The reaction was immediate.Within the next 2 weeks more than 1,500 commentsappeared on the main YouTube video. Rather than wantingone as a pet the public outcry had turned to conservation,informing viewers of the cruel trade, the removal of teethfor use in medicines, and the death usually faced by animalsin markets; viewers also implored those responsible foruploading the video to remove it. On 9 February, after3 years and being one of the most popular animal videoson YouTube, the main video was removed.Many copies of the video remain on YouTube, however.Whether YouTube videos of threatened species as petsimperils them and encourages their trade is diﬃcult toquantify. The case of the slow loris illustrates, however, howproviding the public with correct information on threatenedspecies can have immediate and direct impact on attitudesand opinions.K.A.I. NEKARIS and N. CAMPBELL Nocturnal Primate ResearchGroup, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, OX3 0BP, UKE-mail anekaris@brookes.ac.ukFrom Alaska to Patagonia: the IUCN Red List ofthe Continental Ecosystems of the AmericasIn October 2008 the IUCN launched a process forestablishing an IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. For most of2009 and 2010 members of a working group organized byIUCN’s Commission on Ecosystem Management andEcosystemManagement Programme focused on developingpreliminary quantitative criteria for categorizing ecosystemsaccording to their risk of collapse (i.e. disappearance ortransformation into another ecosystem), using a processanalogous to that used for the IUCN Red List of ThreatenedSpecies (Rodríguez et al., 2011, Conservation Biology, 25,21–29).With major support from the MAVA Foundation,and co-sponsorship from the Smithsonian Institution,EcoHealth Alliance, Provita and the Fulbright Program,an ongoing global consultation was launched to testpreliminary criteria in a range of ecosystem types and indiﬀerent regions and institutional settings. Additionalfeedback will be sought during the IV World ConservationCongress (Jeju, Korea, 6–15 September 2012), with the aimof having a revised set of quantitative criteria available tothe scientiﬁc community by 2013.Over the next decade the hope is to assess all the world’sland masses and oceans, leading to complete coverage ofterrestrial, freshwater, marine and subterranean ecosystems.We anticipate a signiﬁcant expansion in existing insti-tutional and technical capacity, especially in biodiversity-rich countries in the developing world, for assessing risk toecosystems and for using this information for conservationdecision-making by all sectors of society.With the generous support of the Gordon and BettyMoore Foundation we will undertake a new challengeduring 2012–2014: the IUCN Red List of the ContinentalEcosystems of the Americas. Activities will be structuredaround three themes that can be broadly deﬁned as science,public awareness, and biodiversity policy. The scientiﬁcaim will be to assess fully the conservation status of thecontinental ecosystems of the Americas by developing aseries of baselines across the continental distribution of eachtype, assessing land cover change against these baselines,quantifying the drivers of change, and applying the RedList criteria to ecosystems at the regional and national level.Our public awareness aim is to improve public access to170 Conservation news© 2012 Fauna & Flora International, Oryx, 46(2), 169–174https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605312000439Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 09:45:07, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available atinformation on the status of ecosystems by creating an onlineopen-access toolbox for housing and analysing scientiﬁcdata, developing a portfolio of scientiﬁc and popularpublications, improving public knowledge, and integratingthe Red List of Ecosystems with the IUCN Red List ofThreatened Species and World Database of Protected Areasto enhance biodiversity conservation planning. The bio-diversity policy aim is to use the Red List of Ecosystems toengage actively with governments in the region in thedevelopment of national Red Lists of Ecosystems, informingregional economic, social and environmental cooperationorganizations, and maintaining a high proﬁle at key globalbiodiversity-related scientiﬁc meetings.By using the experience of the IUCN Red List ofThreatened Species as a model, the present eﬀort has thepotential to inﬂuence allocation of conservation resourcesto threatened ecosystems throughout the world, and toinﬂuence the policy process of biodiversity-related inter-national conventions such as the Convention on BiologicalDiversity (e.g. Aichi Biodiversity Target 5 adopted inNagoya in October 2010) and the Ramsar Convention onWetlands of International Importance. Similar eﬀects couldalso be expected at the national level, as public knowledge ofecosystem risk increases and countries around the worldimplement Red Lists of Ecosystems. An IUCN Red List ofEcosystems also has the potential to serve as an importantinstrument to guide investments for several MillenniumDevelopment Goals, as poverty reduction and improve-ments in health are dependent on properly-functioningecosystems that provide important goods and services forhuman well being. For more information, updates andinformation on how to become involved please visit http://www.iucn.org/about/union/commissions/cem/cem_work/tg_red_list/JON PAUL RODRÍGUEZ* and KATHRYN M. RODRÍGUEZ-CLARK Centrode Ecología, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientíﬁcas,Apdo. 20632, Caracas 1020-A, VenezuelaE-mail jonpaul@ivic.gob.veDAVID A. KEITH Australian Wetlands and Rivers Centre,University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and NewSouth Wales Oﬃce of Environment & Heritage, Hurstville, NewSouth Wales, AustraliaEDMUND G. BARROW IUCN Ecosystem Management Programme,Gland, SwitzerlandPATRICK COMER NatureServe, Boulder, Colorado USAMARÍA A. OLIVEIRA-MIRANDA Provita, Caracas, Venezuela*Also at Provita, Caracas, Venezuela, and IUCN Commissionon Ecosystem Management and IUCN Species SurvivalCommission, Gland, SwitzerlandMangrove conservation amidst land sharksMangroves in and around Mumbai, India, have undergonemassive destruction and c. 70% of Mumbai’s mangroveshave been destroyed by various development activities.In spite of the protection aﬀorded by several Acts,mangroves in the city continue to face destruction. Since2005 the Conservation Action Trust, a registered non-proﬁtorganization formed to protect the environment, andparticularly wildlife and forests, with a focus on mangroves,has been handling a number of cases that were ﬁled bythe Bombay Environmental Action Group prior to theformation of the Trust. The Trust is dedicated to providingassistance in the form of technical information, legaladvice, aid and equipment to those who are confrontingenvironmental problems. It works closely with ForestDepartments and NGOs working to protect nature andnatural resources.To protect the remaining mangroves in and aroundMumbai, Debi Goenka, the Executive Trustee of theConservation Action Trust, ﬁled a Writ Petition in theBombay High Court seeking the Court’s intervention toinhibit the destruction of mangroves. The result was anorder passed by the Honourable High Court on 6 October2005 that states: (1) There shall be a total freeze on thedestruction and cutting of mangroves. (2) All constructionand rubble/garbage dumping on themangrove areas shall bestopped forthwith. (3) Regardless of ownership of the land,all construction taking place within 50m on all sides of allmangroves shall be forthwith stopped. (4) All Governmentowned land will be notiﬁed as Protected Forests and handedover to the Forest Department.However, there was a delay in notifying the areas asProtected Forests, in view of which a further order dated 27January 2010was passed to protect the mangroves in Raigad,Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg Districts. As per this Order, ‘nonon forests activity should be permitted by the respondentstate in these mangrove areas throughout the state ofMaharashtra which shall be subject to section 2 of theForests (Conservation) Act 1980 and EnvironmentProtection Act and Rules, without taking permission fromthe competent authority’.Based on these orders and the eﬀorts of the ConservationAction Trust for protection and conservation of mangroves,in November 2011 the Supreme Court rejected a plea by alocal builder to convert the mangroves to salt pans (atDahisar, Mumbai). The builder had already constructednew bunds and dumped thousands of truck loads of debrisso as to take over a 430-acre mangrove-covered site forprivate development. In the ﬁeld the Trust’s team wasrepeatedly threatened, attacked at least twice and hadequipment stolen. However, the Trust continued thecampaign along with a local residents’ group and was ableto halt the destruction of these mangroves.Conservation news 171© 2012 Fauna & Flora International, Oryx, 46(2), 169–174https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605312000439Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 09:45:07, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at

From Alaska to Patagonia: the IUCN Red List of the Continental Ecosystems of the Americas

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