Today is Endangered Species Day, a day on which hundreds of thousands of people around the world celebrate, learn, and take action to protect threatened and endangered species. Since the founding of this day in 2006, the biodiversity crisis that threatens millions of plant and animal species has only gotten worse, with 44,000 species threatened or endangered, including 41% of amphibians, 37% of sharks and rays, 36% of reef building corals, 34% of conifers, 26% of mammals and 12% of birds.
That includes over 100 species in Georgia alone, such as the alligator snapping turtle, red-cockaded woodpecker, Etowah darter, and several mussel species found only in our state. These species are being pushed to the brink by many factors, including overdevelopment, pollution, and climate change.
While that may be a daunting challenge, The Nature Conservancy in Georgia is hard at work to not only slow and stop those trends but reverse them. Take Georgia’s red-cockaded woodpecker, for example. In the early 1900s, the red-cockaded woodpecker was found “abundantly” in the pine forests of the southeastern United States with an original population number over 1.5 million. Today, there are only estimated to be 15-20,000 birds across the entire Southeast, representing less than 1 percent of the woodpecker’s population.
The primary threat for these birds is habitat destruction. The overall number of older pines and the size of the forests have both decreased. The remaining forestland is highly fragmented, making it hard for new generations of birds to find suitable sites. Thankfully, we noticed many of these trends happening in Georgia and have been working for over a decade to restore the longleaf pine habitats they call home by planting over one million new trees per year and treating those forests with prescribed fire, helping to create and maintain the open forests the birds prefer.
Due to those efforts, we have seen those woodpecker populations increase by the dozens in just the last few years in areas like the Chattahoochee Fall Line in west-central Georgia and Moody Forest in Southeast Georgia. Similarly, thanks to our work and the efforts of countless conservation partners, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided not to list the gopher tortoise as a threatened or endangered species in its eastern population range. Compare that to the western population range, which was listed as threatened, with the eastern range found to have higher populations of gopher tortoises and more habitat management than the western range.
There is no question that the biodiversity crisis is one of the greatest challenges facing Georgia, the country, and the planet. Species like the flatwoods salamander, whose Georgia populations only exist in a handful of ponds and whose survival is highly dependent on our conservation efforts, continue to face an uphill battle. Even the extinction of a few insect species can devastate an ecosystem because of their place at the base of the food chain.
However, as The Nature Conservancy and our partners prove every day, now is not the time for us to despair. If we commit to working together at every level, from governments to corporations to non-profits, we can save the species that support all life on Earth.
The Threatened and Endangered Species List isn’t an obituary, it’s a warning. On this Endangered Species Day, we can and should all commit to doing everything we can to bring as many species as we can back from the brink.
