Revealing the Widespread Bias of Extinction Risk in the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean

Abstract

Accelerating environmental change in the Antarctic and Southern Ocean (ASO) necessitates robust extinction risk assessments to inform conservation priorities and track progress towards global biodiversity targets. Nevertheless, no systematic, region-wide baseline of extinction risk currently exists for tracking ASO biodiversity responses to ongoing change, a significant barrier to global biodiversity monitoring. Here, we present the first comprehensive synthesis of extinction risk knowledge spanning plants, animals, and fungi across the ASO, examining biases in current assessments, the distribution of Threatened species and their associated threats. In the absence of a complete regional species checklist, species were compiled from >6,800,000 occurrences and existing checklists, yielding 5,403 assessments representing 2,806 species using a data-inclusive workflow that increased available assessments by over three-fold. Assessments are heavily biased towards vertebrates (56% assessed), while invertebrates, despite their ecological prevalence, are markedly underrepresented (4% assessed). Among vertebrates, mammals have the highest proportion of Threatened species (35%), while ASO birds are disproportionately Threatened (27%) compared to the global average (12%) with the greatest threat for ASO species being Biological Resource Use. Despite more Threatened species in the sub-Antarctic islands and the Antarctic Peninsula, relative to assessment effort, these regions had fewer Threatened species than expected, indicating these areas may function as refugia. These pronounced assessment biases highlight the need for more balanced, representative, and data-inclusive extinction risk assessments to be able to effectively detect conservation status change. This work represents an important step in ensuring ASO representation in global biodiversity monitoring frameworks strengthening the capacity of these frameworks to detect, attribute, and respond to future biodiversity changes.